Roomies is a mobile application that promotes better communication with your roommates, regarding managing house chores, sleep hours, splitting bills, and more. My research and survey have shown that 73.3% of shared home renters had experienced conflicts with their roommates.
Managing chores is one of the most important responsibilities of a shared renter.
Roomies allow all roommates to review the assigned chores to help respect the house's public spaces.
Most often, having cordial chemistry is usually because there is friendship. Therefore, Roomies encourages roommates to do activities together.
Having the ability to have a guest over is a renter's right. But out of courtesy, you should notify your roommates when someone else is coming. Roomies help make that process easier by allowing you to sign in guests without all the hassle.
To respect each other's sleep schedule, Roomies help inform everyone in the household about each other's sleep schedule.
Living with roommates is hard. People have different lifestyles, sleeping habits, hygiene, etc. It is not always easy to get used to someone, especially when it is compromising your quality of life. As a 5 year home renter with roommates, I have experienced roommate issues that got heated. Therefore, I am motivated to look into how might we improve the relationship between roommates.
UX Research is conducted to understand roommate and their behaviors. Consequently to discover opportunity areas by analyzing those emerging patterns and problems. With the need of studying these factors at a scale in a short time, user surveys and user interviews are conducted.
Most concluded that: There isn’t a consistent method to address problems with their roommates.
These responses have demonstrated how often shared renters experience conflict and how challenging it is to communicate regarding conduct.
Most concluded that: There isn’t a consistent method to address problems with their roommates.
Organizing advanced insights into a map demonstrates the notion of how most actions the participants used to communicate with their roommates are not effective and detrimental to their relationship.
In the ideal world, roommates should communicate on how to manage chores and take turns doing them. But based on the interview and survey, that is not always the case. Either results in one single person handling all the chores or constant reminders to each other to do them.
Confronting roommates for being too loud past bedtime is the right way to do. But sometimes it gets frustrating to inform them about the quiet hour. Oftentimes, either it results in a heated conversation or one does nothing to speak up for him/her.
Most participants agree that roommates are allowed to bring guests over as long as there is advanced notice.
We found an insight that most cordial relationships are because they become friends. On the other hand, those who never hang out or talk to their roommates have a higher chance of having issues.
1) Manage cleaning duties and household chores efficiently
2) Communicate regarding noise and quiet hours
3) Improve relationships between roommates
4) Inform others about bringing guests over
A brainstorming session with friends to list out some potential solutions. For example, we wrote, “use a calendar that optimizes duty management” for how might we manage cleaning duties and “set up bonding events” to improve relationships.
The collective brainstorming ideas have led to a few potential solutions that may be utilized through the use of a mobile app.
Before sketching the wireframe, I kicked off with a basic User Flow for the key MVPs: Chores, Bonding, Sleep, and Guests. The user flow is refined to achieve an optimized experience. Most Experience is in a linear flow, which is designed to make the process intuitive and easy across all actionable tasks.
Chores Management is the most crucial part of a healthy roommate relationship, this is the wireframe of how one assigns a chore, reviews upcoming tasks, and marks the task complete.
The design of making each other's sleep hour or quiet hour transparent. It is designed so the user could set a routine schedule or make adjustments if needed. When the time passed one's designated sleep hour, the application will send out a notification to remind other roommates — to take off the stress and reduce the instances of reminding each other personally.
From research, shared renters respect the right of guests as long as there is advanced notice. This is an exploration of flow where the user goes through the process of "guest sign-in" and lets the App does the communication in the Guest Page
To encourage roommates to do stuff together, a bonding session page is designed for roommates to set up events for everyone in the household to join.
By aiming to make our visual system to be friendly and easygoing, I created a palette center around Cerulean Blue, which is a soothing, calming color that evokes feelings of peace and confidence.
The design presents a friendly interface with beautiful photo assets, which adds a sense of engagement to the users. I propose that the user could upload their own photos for the application. The home dashboard is a welcoming design that includes the latest notifications regarding the household as well as the upcoming tasks that are due.
Here are the final interfaces, where we focused on the key insights from our research. We covered moments from Pre-visit, In-Hospital, and Post-visit. In Pre-visit, we focused on booking with utilizing VUI assistant to optimize the user experience of finding a doctor for a symptom. The user will go through choosing a provider, scheduling, and requesting accommodations in a form of a friendly and casual conversation.
While working on the Roomies app, one of the key things I learned was the importance of looking at prototypes of healthy roommate relationships. Through my research and survey, I discovered that friendship is a key component of successfully shared living arrangements. This insight motivated me to design a bonding page within the app, which provides users with ideas and activities for building positive relationships with their roommates.
Another important lesson I learned during the development of the Roomies app was the value of clear communication and conflict resolution. Many of the conflicts that arise between roommates can be prevented or resolved through open and honest communication. To this end, I included features in the app like shared to-do lists and a guest policy page to help roommates clearly communicate their expectations and needs to one another.
Overall, the development of the Roomies app has been a valuable learning experience for me. I have gained a greater understanding of the challenges and opportunities that come with shared living, and I am grateful for the opportunity to use this knowledge to help others.
