Roomies

Promote roommate relationship and communication

Team

Jason Wang

Role

User Research
Concept Development
Interface Design

Tools

Figma

TImeline

Aug - Oct. 2022 (6 Weeks)

Overview

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.

Design objective

Roomies aims to engage communications effectively that leads to a healthy relationship with roommates.

OutCome: INterface design

Roomies promotes relationship and communication with your roommates

Chores Management

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.

Bonding Session

Most often, having cordial chemistry is usually because there is friendship. Therefore, Roomies encourages roommates to do activities together.

Guest Management

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.

Sleep/Quiet Hour

To respect each other's sleep schedule, Roomies help inform everyone in the household about each other's sleep schedule.

choice of field

Why Roommates?

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.

LORA

Your personal assistant to better connect you with healthcare services

Why is it hard to live with 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.

LORA

Your personal assistant to better connect you with healthcare services

research

Survey Insights

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.

How does the relationship aggravate?

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.

distribute chores

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.

loud issues

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.

guest policy

Most participants agree that roommates are allowed to bring guests over as long as there is advanced notice.

Bonding

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.

LORA

Your personal assistant to better connect you with healthcare services

How Might We?

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

Brainstorming

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.

Designing the ROOMIES: User Flow

User Flow

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.

Designing the ROOMIES: Wireframe

Chores Management

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.

chore page
Define
assign
review
mark done

Notifying Roommates Sleep hour

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.

Sleep hour Page
adjust
set new time
add a message
notification

Notifying about Guests

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

guest Page
add
select time
number of guest
add a message

Improve friendship by creating Events

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.

bonding Page
add
select type
add details
send response

designing the look and feel

Design System

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.

graphical user interface

Home Mobile Interface

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.

Designing the ROOMIES: Wireframe

Final Mobile GUI

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.

Create a chore

sleep Page
adjust the time
updated time
notification

Create a bonding event

bonding page
add
add details
invitation
PERSPECTIVE

sign in a guest

guest page
add
add details
notification - What others see

add a sleep schedule

sleep Page
adjust the time
updated time
notification - What others see

reflection

What I learned from this experience

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.