Roomie!

1. Prototype link Link
2. Describe your project (max 150 words)

Our project, Roomie, seeks to aid undergraduate students in their summer housing and roommate search process by giving them a platform to connect with other students looking for summer housing and seek advice from those who have experienced the process.

The summer housing and roommate search process is daunting. Oftentimes, college students are moving to unfamiliar cities for summer internships and have to rely on their own resources to find housing and/or roommates. Roomie aims to ease the process of finding roommates in a new community and empower students with more information about summer housing through advice from students who have previously gone through the summer housing process and/or have lived in these communities. Roomie’s main features include specialized "communities" where students can join, post inquiries, and engage in direct messaging to facilitate a more seamless and informed summer housing journey.

1. Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words)

After settling on our problem statement, “how might we streamline and provide more information about the summer roommate search process for undergraduate students?”, we sent a survey to 11 undergraduate students at our college. In our survey, we asked the following questions:

1. Do you have experience in finding temporary housing?
2. On a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being the least and 5 being the most), how much do you struggle with finding summer roommates?
   
3. How do you or how would you go about finding summer roommates?
   
4. What is the hardest part of the summer roommate/housing search process?
5. What information do you think would be helpful in the roommate search process?
   
6. What factors do you consider most when searching for housing?

From this survey, we found that ten out of eleven respondents did not have prior experience with searching for housing. In addition, rent, commute to the workplace, and housing location ranked highest in terms of importance in considering a place to live. The most popular housing search method was “word of mouth/friends,” followed by Instagram, neither of which are methods specific for larger groups of people in the same area looking for housing.

1. Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words)

Our filter function and tags were most heavily influenced by the survey results, as we deduced the factors that were most important to students in both roommate and housing search. For instance, rent and location/neighborhood were priorities for our respondents, so we included these categories as filter options in Roomie. We also incorporated some of the research findings regarding what people would want in potential roommates into the tags on a user’s profile, such as living style or habits, cleanliness, and academic background.

Another important design decision we made was structuring the flow of pages from after logging in to accessing communities. For instance, we were unsure whether cities should just be a tag, but we ended up incorporating a dashboard in which every city was a different community, and students could join and view different communities for city-specific posts. Within these communities, we then included the aforementioned tags and filtering options. This decision reduced the number of tags that users would have to apply, and also sorted posts into their respective communities. Overall, we aimed for a clean design and uncluttered screen, since our goal was to make this process as simple as possible for students.

Built With

• figma