Inspired by my past roommate experiences, I initiated this app design case study to help roommates manage their household interactions together.
User research
Prototyping
Visual design
Usability testing
Competitive analysis
Affinity diagram
User flow
Preference test
2 weeks
Adobe XD
Adobe Illustrator
Axure
User recruitment, user interviews, prototyping, usability testing
Competitive analysis, persona, empathy map, journey map, user flow, affinity diagram, low & high fidelity prototypes
5 weeks
This is a common saying that senior students pass down to the freshmen at my school. I’ve also had my fair share of both good and bad roommates, and I heard horrifying roommate stories from my unfortunate friends. This is what inspired me to design an app that will help people manage and improve their roommate experiences.
I was the sole designer for this case study and I designed both the visuals and features of the app. Using the design thinking process, I created a complete prototype of Homely!
There are tons of apps that match roommates based on questionnaires, but what’s available to help roommates live together? To my surprise, these apps don't really exist. The identified apps focus on managing grocery lists, tracking bills, and setting cleaning schedules. However, none of them focus on the roommate experience or help them resolve existing issues. From this competitor research, I’ve defined the problem space as follows:
I want to help user groups who are most likely to have a roommate. Based on the background research, these two user groups are the focus of my project.
87% of students had roommates in college and 25% have reported that they ran into roommate problems.
Opportunity: Homely will help students navigate through their first roommate experience.
A third of the young adults in the US between 25 to 34 live with their relatives or roommates.
Opportunity: Homely will help young working professionals easily manage household tasks and focus on their jobs.
Before starting the user research, I set three goals I want to achieve:
1. Identify common pain-points of living together.
2. Understand why issues arise and how they are resolved.
3. Understand how household interactions are managed for existing good roommate experiences.
User interview is chosen as the research method to gain a deep understanding of common pain-points, roommate conflicts, and household interactions. I interviewed 10 people who are either students or young working professionals.
An affinity diagram session helped me extract insights from the interviews. For the pain-points, I grouped the notes into what the pain-points are, how users want to resolve them, and what resolutions worked.
By synthesizing my findings, I discovered the following insights and defined the what ifs:
I started visualizing the features and navigation structure with sketches. There are five main features that solve the user pain-points identified in the insights: set quiet hours, create cleaning tasks, initiate requests, track bills and grocery trips, and growing plants in a community garden.
Taking it a step further, I created low-fidelity wireframes in Axure. A vertical scrolling card layout is chosen to organize tasks in a chronological order and help users focus on one task at a time. The bottom navigation bar and the top tab selections keep the navigational structure organized. Some of the key wireframe screens are highlighted below.
Next, I identified the sub user flows under each of the five main app features, which are all accessed from dashboard. In essence, the user flow for each feature contains add, view, edit, view history, and feature dependent flows.
I talked to 3 users and walked through the wireframes with them. The goals of this wireframe user testing are:
1. Test the navigation structure and identify any confusions.
2. Gain feedback on the community garden feature that helps track accountability using a points system after task completion.
1. People loved the community garden idea for a balance between accountability and competitiveness.
2. Navigation was simple and intuitive.
1. Lack of inter-communication within the app.
2. Icons were unclear and hard to discover.
3. Difficult to understand the current status of requests when assigned to multiple people.
4. Shopping list doesn't allow shared items.
While keeping these findings in mind, I started the next round of prototyping: visual design and high-fidelity prototyping.
With a final round of usability testing on the high-fidelity prototype, I made the following iterations and confirmed the changes with preference testing.
During testing, many people were unsure if icons are interactable. I increased size and deepened color of all interactable icons on task cards for easier discovery and interactivity.
During testing, people often re-clicked on the task to make sure their action was completed correctly. I implemented a user feedback with a pop-up confirmation.
People wanted to view the bills owing/owed to before settling the bills. I created an overview page for the bills owing and owed to based on the specific roommate.
On the community garden page, some people were unsure whether they are focused on the sunflower or the sprout. I highlighted the current plant by reducing the saturation and increasing exposure on the background.
Household cleaning can now be fairly distributed as tasks while maintaining accountability and transparency using the points system in the community garden.
Insight addressed: Different expectations towards cleanliness is the number one frustration of living with roommates.
Issues can be brought up and tracked online by initiating a request to the roommates. Roommates can comment on the request and monitor the progress until it is resolved. It can also be used to ask for small favors from roommates.
Insight addressed: Conflicts don’t get resolved when people avoid confrontation or don’t adhere to the resolution.
People can easily organize and rotate grocery runs with a shopping list and bills tracking.
Insight addressed: People don’t share groceries because it’s inconvenient to coordinate grocery runs and track bills.
People can set both fixed and flexible quiet hours for night time and other special needs, such as for interviews.
Insight addressed: Loud noises or bright light at night impacts the quality of sleep. People also want flexible quiet time during the day based on their needs.
On top of tracking accountability, the community garden feature also allows the whole household to grow a plant together, helping to initiate fun conversations and strengthen the roommate relationship.
Insight addressed: People want to live with roommates for the cost saving and companionship. The housing experience has a significant impact on the relationship between roommates.
To simplify the process of settling expenses with roommates, I want to integrate Homely's settle expense function with a payment app, such as Venmo.
I want to categorize the shopping list into categories of food to help users navigate the grocery store easily.
To help new roommates learn about each other, I want to add a personal profile function under each household. This profile will include people’s birthday and a short bio to help initiate conversations and birthday celebrations, inspiring a deeper connection and relationship.
This is my first app design case study! I learned so much from undergoing this UI/UX exercise. To highlight a few:
1. Because of COVID19, I conducted all of my user interviews and usability testing remotely through Google Hangout. On top of some technical challenges with screen recordings and microphones, it was difficult to observe how the users scan the page and where they hover their fingers. Although not ideal, I still managed to gain some feedback by conducting usability testings on desktop to observe how the mouse moves.
2. By replaying the interview recordings, I noticed that I need to work on eliminating all my filler words, avoid asking leading follow-up questions, and not giving away answers until the end of the interview.
