Roomie Ready.

Inspiration

Our ideation started with the unspoken rule of being a good roommate/housemate. Everyone says "just be a good roommate," but no one defines what it really means. We've noticed that roommate expectations often feel obvious to one person but invisible to another, leading to quiet resentment instead of conversation. Our research showed that these can contribute to real stress and lower well-being. Inspired by Dumb Ways to Die's light-hearted way to explain real "invisible" issues.

What it does

Roomie Ready. is an app that focuses on building communication skills between roommates and healthy ways to discuss unspoken boundaries and expectations. Through a cozy, game-like experience, roommates set real house expectations together, track them using playful doll archetypes that reflect real-life behaviour, and are nudged towards honest conversations before small frustrations build into lasting resentment.

How we built it

We designed the app on Figma and created a reminder widget for when real-life meetings need to happen. We used AI to help generate our visual assets and prototyped our game-like interface on Figma, iterating on the doll characters and harmony mechanics to keep the experience playful, intuitive, and help have mindful conversations easily.

Challenges we ran into

Ideation of our topic and problem area was difficult. It took time to narrow down and combine various ideas into one clear direction. We had trouble prioritising whether to focus on communication between roommates or on understanding what the rules meant in the first place, since both felt equally important. Deciding on our user and core flow and building on figma early helped us cut through the uncertainty and commit to a direction we could build.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building something so visually aesthetic, but also something people could potentially use in such a short amount of time. Having good communication and positive energy throughout our design process helped us create something we're really proud of!

What we learned

How to conceptualise open-ended and ambiguous design briefs and build on to it together in such a short amount of time!! Learning how big of an issue our unspoken rule is and how it can affect people long-term was something new we explored, and especially getting to do primary research helped us discover so many good insights.

What's next for Roomie Ready.

Working on customising towards each roommate's needs, refining the archetypes and harmony mechanics for more meaningful outcomes and covering more real house scenarios, building the reminder system into the widgets for more mindful check-ins.