Roommate

Moving to a new city for work or study has become very common in today's fast-paced world. I saw people struggle to find a room or a roommate in a new city: landlord contacts were often fake, or they couldn't find someone they'd be happy to live with.

RoomMate helps you find your ideal roommate, or a room within your budget, without worrying about fake landlord contacts or a roommate whose habits you're not comfortable with. You can choose a roommate after reading about their living habits, moving preferences and everything else you need to know.

Finding a room is even easier: you can contact the landlord directly after checking the rent, photos and amenities. RoomMate is your first stop after moving to a new city.

I started with secondary research to identify difficulties and understand the existing conditions. Based on those inputs, I then carried out primary research to better grasp the project's aim and empathize with users.

I did both qualitative and quantitative research and noticed clear patterns in the responses. I also ran online interviews with ten more people, asking the same quantitative questions as in the survey, and their answers followed the same trends.

After considering users' objectives, I combined their goals into a single main user flow. This helped me understand the steps a user takes to reach their goal as efficiently as possible, and in turn the information architecture the app needs to support that flow. The most important scenario is finding shared accommodation quickly, close to the user's workplace.

It's hard to gain the perspective needed to find design solutions. Productive ideation needs a dedicated space for stepping back and looking at the problem from every angle. But first, the team has to identify the right problem to solve. That comes from the Empathize stage (gaining user insights through research and observation) and the Define stage (finding patterns in those insights to form a meaningful, workable problem statement).

In the Design phase, I was ready to design an early version of the solution. Prototyping is one of the best ways to reveal how users think and feel about a product, and it helped me resolve uncertainties about the chosen idea. Creating several prototypes takes the risk out of innovation: it lets me fail quickly instead of spending time and money on an idea that may not work in practice.