Mate - Roommate/Room Finding App

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UX/UI Case Study - Roommate/Room Finding App

Mate.

Your partner in your hunt.

Finding it hard to find a roommate and a place to stay in your twenties? Very tough.

Context

A few trends of note: 54% of the world's population live in urban communities, the average marriage age for men is 29 (up from 26 two decades ago) and for women is 27 (up from 23 in the same time period). Given these trends, city dwellers tend to spend most of their twenties living with roommates. Finding and keeping a good roommate, however, gets harder as more people swarm into cities.

Problem Statement

Design a mobile product experience that appeals to millennials that makes it safe to find the ideal roommate in New Delhi, from the perspective of a person who is looking for a roommate as well as the one who is looking for the apartment. Once the ideal roommate is found, what else can this product do to make the roommate experience better?

Majorly it requires two things to be done:

There are two people involved in this, (the one who is looking for a room and the one that wants to rent a room), the service should be designed from the perspective of both of them.

Another part of the challenge is to find pain points in a journey and propose solutions for them.

Research & Survey

Gone through different already existing mobile apps who are in the same business and also did a survey with 4-5 people to understand the problems. Tried to get into the deep research and every aspect to develop a much needed solution. After the complete research I've analysed some pain points which are :-

- Hard to find an ideal roommate because most people are different in geography, interests, age, etc

- Time, it takes a lot of time to search places which matches my expectations

- Fake images (room pictures are uploaded from the internet)

- Very unorganised listing

- User profiles doesn't provide the complete details

- Users interest/hobbies are not listed

- Users social profiles are not added

- Lack of visibility on important stuffs

- No recommendation system (from ex-roommate/ex-landlord)

- Very limited filters (difficult to get the best results)

- Too many clicks

- No expense/chores sharing system

User Persona

Now after analysing and researching about all those aspects, I have created two (a roomer and a landlord) user personas based on the previous information in order to empathise a bit with them. The user goals and frustration helped to gain better understanding of the problem.

User Journey Map

I have created this user journey map so that I can have a better understanding and addressing target audience needs and pain points.

Task Flow

Design Approach

Designed a product experience for the target audience (Millennials in Delhi, looking for a room/roommate) focus on user problem solving and motivate users to use digital products to find their ideal roommates and a flat/room as per their expectations. And also manage basic need through the mobile application itself.

Task : Find an Ideal Roommate/Find an Ideal Landlord (room owner)

Design Solutions

- The fastest approach to find Roommates with maximum user preferences matched.

- In the chat box a person can only send live images of the room (if fake images are uploaded of a room, you can verify it)

- Adding more options in filter section to get the best results

- Addition of social profiles (Instagram, Facebook, on Twitter) for better connectivity (Aha! Instagram looks fun, Naaice :P)

- Recommendation option (you can give one or receive one from your ex roommate/landlord)

- Interests and hobbies filter

- Green online button shows in the people section if someone is online

- Video call option in the chat box

- After getting done with all finding and searching, there is this feature (My Home) in the tab bar in which you have to join or create a home for managing all your basic needs, like expense sharing between roommates, chores division, task management and utilities division.

Wireframes

Rough sketches of screens.

Visual Design

The Design of Mate is very minimal with easy navigation so that every user can easily go through it, even a novice user can start searching in just few clicks. The typeface used is Roboto, which is quite easy to read. The typography has been picked keeping in mind the heavy mobile usage and also ensuring good quality on lower end phones too. I've not only focused for satisfying users' aesthetics requirements, but also to make it highly optimised to provide greater degree of usability and accessibility to the end-users.

Neomorphism UI (for the buttons) have been introduced to enhance the overall look and feel of the application. I've kept the entire background black so that it will make it easier for users to read content in low light conditions in the evening or at night. Anyway with time most of the apps are going towards dark theme.

Color Palette