Role:
UI/UX Design
Product Design
Timeline:
Feb - Mar 2018
Context:
Final Design Project at UC San Diego in DSGN 1: Design of Everyday Things
Project Overview
Working in a team of six, I helped redesign the roommate selection process at UCSD. I was primarily responsible for user research, low-fidelity prototyping, and editing the video that presents our problem.
Problem
Having an incompatible roommate or housemate can not only affect a person's housing experience, but it can also bleed into other aspects of their college life, ultimately giving that person a bad user experience of college in general. Because my team has had our share of bad roommate experiences or have heard numerous horror stories, the problem with the selection process also affected us.
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UCSD, in particular, requires its students to fill out a questionnaire for on-campus housing. However, the problem with the UCSD Questionnaire was that the questions are too simple and insufficient for matching potential roommates and it fails to consider many of the applicants’ concerns. In addition, the wording is vague and as a result, applicants tend to answer subjectively. Because of this, some people resort to other platforms, such as Facebook, to find a roommate. But even then, their roommates may not be ideal.
Research
We decided to narrow down our scope onto UCSD undergraduate students at each year, as our setting allowed us the most access to these particular users. In our interviews, we asked the participants to answer the UCSD questionnaire and create a private or fake Facebook post as they would if they were to use Facebook to search for a roommate. We also asked the users to explain their answers and think aloud as they completed the survey and the Facebook post.
UCSD Questionnaire
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Do you smoke?
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Do you drink?
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How clean do you like your room to be?
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How late do you stay up?
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What time do you wake up?
Facebook post
Through these interviews, our initial thoughts of the UCSD questionnaire being too simple and vague were confirmed with the thoughts of our participants. We were surprised that some of our participants liked the questionnaire because they addressed important concerns, such as "do you smoke?" or "how clean do you like your room to be?" However, they wished that it was more interactive like the Facebook post, in that they were able to converse with potential roommates before deciding to make it official. Users also said that while Facebook is good for interaction, it lacks structure since there's no official guideline of what to write about when looking for a roommate. Another problem is that some people tend to embellish their posts essentially selling themselves to find a good roommate.
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We looked at other competing platforms, such as Roomi and Craigslist, to help us discover the level of interactivity that users want.
Roomi
Craigslist
Prototypes
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Ultimately, we decided to create a web application and just redesign the UCSD questionnaire, but also add some level of interactivity that resembles Facebook. Redesigning the questionnaire would benefit familiarity students have of existing platforms. The standardization of the questionnaire ensured that the statistical data was comparable while the Facebook template allowed for a fuller picture of the applicant.
Our paper prototypes demonstrate initial ideas for ways to represent roommate matches. This was a difficult topic since we have “preliminary” matches made by our system based solely on survey results, and an additional type of “user” matching.
The following pictures show our early chalkboard low-fidelity sketches of what ultimately became the final Roomür web app. Here we explored potential homepage ideas. Pictured left is a Profile Page landing page idea and on the right is a feed of suggested users to consider rooming with.
Redesign
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Our redesign, Roomür, is a multi-step process that combines both the the UCSD questionnaire and Facebook onto one centralized webapp. For one, Roomür is more focused and more structured compared to Facebook. Additionally, the redesign allows for the applicants to interact with one another and get to know one another better before becoming roommates, unlike the questionnaire, which a one-sided interaction between the user and the system that results in the user not knowing about potential roommates until they have been assigned.
Reflection
Working in a bigger group for this project had its ups and downs. I’m very thankful for my teammates because not only did they exceed my expectations of working together, but we also had fun doing this project. Sometimes we would get distracted while working on the project just because we having too much fun being together, but someone always made sure that we needed to focus on working again. Having six people in the group also allowed for different perspectives on the redesign. It was a good thing since we were able to brainstorm many different ideas, but it was also bad as we didn't agree on everything. However, we found a medium and created our design.
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I also found our redesign to be more time-consuming since the original UCSD questionnaire was only five questions and our redesign is a multi-step process. However, I think that finding a roommate is a process that necessitates more than a few minutes in order to find the perfect roommate.
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In the future, I would want to code an actual webapp so that we could probably beta-test it with initial users; from there, we would continue to iterate and improve our app. I would also want to incorporate a feedback system where our users can rate their roommate experience.