RUM8 Mobile App Concept
Product Design (Housing/Accomodations)
Role: Lead UX/UI Designer (Team of Four)
Timeframe: 3.5 Week Sprint
Tools Used: Miro, Figma, Photoshop, Zoom
Millions of American's live in non family related shared households. Not all of those partnerships end happily.
Finding Our Obstacle
Defining Our Goal
How might we ground our findings to provide safe accommodations for users and maintain user conversion to retention rates?
What is safe? And how do we measure what that means?
As a team, we initially defined safety through criteria such as background checks, proof of income, and references.
However, upon reflection, we realized that our assumptions lacked a solid foundation. Our focus shifted towards understanding what aspects individuals truly value in a secure living environment. This prompted us to consider the experiences of the millions of Americans residing in shared households and whether they felt secure with their living arrangements.
We started with Remote User Interviews
To gather deeper insights into participants' motivations for seeking roommates, their experiences, and lessons learned. We sat down via zoom with 10 participants who are currently living in a shared household or have been roommates in the past 6-8 months. Our objectives included:
We also performed a survey through Google Forms to gauge what mattered to our audience when looking for a roommate, housing, and compatibility.
Analyzing our data through Affinity Diagramming
We discovered there was a consensus When seeking a roommate, individuals prioritize a swift and dependable means to save money while ensuring a comfortable living environment. One in particular was Kasey Sanchez
How would we do right by Kasey?
We performed SWOT analysis on our competitors solely to see how others were committing to safe and secure agreements. We learned that there weren't many that required identification checks or background checks, many were pay to use and half didn’t offer easy navigation.
This gave us the insights we needed for next steps
Using Rapid Brainstorming and Feature Prioritizations we settled on three rollout features. We wanted to ensure users felt secure and safe using RUM8 while also helping to solve some common disagreements our participants expressed in the past.
We wanted to keep the navigation on the app simple and easy
Offering users social sign in, or traditional login, providing new users with a simple but detailed onboarding experience complete with app tutorial. Then pushing them into the main homepage where they could view profiles similar to dating apps like TINDR. There they could match with a profile only then would they be able to message possible roomies and then to facilitate our conversion to retention rate we offered a budget tab to manage household expenses to avoid the awkwardness of asking someone for money without documented proof.
Testing is coming…
To gather insights before working through High Fidelity Mockups we performed Remote Moderated testing on our wireframes, we defined our objectives:
Can I just split it?
Key findings included changes in our interaction design, copy and adding an autosplit feature to our budget tab.
Moving on we were tasked with what users feel defines “safe design”
We opted for the color orange due to its association with optimism, upliftment, and rejuvenation of the spirit in color psychology. Positive connotations linked with orange include warmth and security. Conversely, charcoal is commonly linked with clean, minimalist design. In addition, Our flat vector illustrations were crafted to evoke a sense of fun, inclusivity, and foster connection. With our colors passing WCAG Guidelines we built out the design of our mockups.
It was finally time for Kasey to create her profile!
We used Kasey as our mock profile and added other profiles and properties she could interact with. Finally, after connecting with Katie they agree to be roommates and Kasey is able to view her household budget and add a new item to autosplit with Katie.
My key findings as a Lead on this project…
Since this was my first ever collaborative design project it was definitely a change of pace from tackling everything myself. I usually just keep going until I’ve reached benchmarks, however this wasn’t something I could just research, prep, and design by myself since I was on a team. So a huge reminder to myself would be to figure out your team's strengths first before diving too deep into things, that way each IC feels they have contributed the best way they can.
What’s next for RUM8?
We've completed our first sprint and are excited for the future at this time our next plans include:
Building out our compatibility algorithm
A/B Testing on profile cards
Partner with a legal entity to offer a roommate agreement that user’s can implement at the beginning of their partnership.