Rent out your next place easily
Task 📓
I was provided with a hypothetical brief to make a mobile app for finding an ideal flatmate in a new city. This task required to actually look for an apartment coupled with choosing a flatmate from someone already living at the location or finding new ones.
Opportunity 💡
The brief for this project was to create an app that would allow people shifting to a new city to find flat & flatmate based on their liking and location constraints. The main features that were important from the brief were:
The ability to choose a city and look for all the available flat options
For a location in the city, look for all the flatmates
Messaging and chat functionality
Set up your personal profile so that other flatmates can contact
Confirm a booking
User Interviews 👨 👩
For user interviews, I spoke to 10 different people who tried to find an apartment on Facebook’s flat & flatmate group.
“It’s a trust thing. It’s hard to find somewhere when you don’t know anyone locally.”
This is the summary:
5 people said the process took too much of their time
2 people said they had communication issues because of language/regional differences
7 people said they would like to know the habits of their flatmates before taking the decision
4 people wanted to know if there are any market areas nearby
“I wanted to find an apartment without smokers and alcoholics.”
Interview Findings
Quotes, main points and habits from the interviews were plotted as an affinity map. A lot of the pain points pointed towards flatmate habits and conduct. Some pointed towards broker and commute issues. It was no surprise since the Indian market is flooded with brokers. Hence, users are often looking for platforms where they can talk directly to the owner or the rent provider.
User pain points
Persona 👨
First, I created a provisional persona of a potential user based on online research and people usually found on Flat & Flatmates groups. Since this app is about discovering new apartments and flatmates, I envision the ideal user is someone working in an IT company setup.
Provisional User Persona
Job Story
I created the following job story:
Task Flow
In my solution, I focused on the two main pain points that the research showed, which are finding flats as fast as possible, and making sure they can learn about their flatmates before taking the final call.
I felt the above task flow was too simple and so decided to detail out the entire app flow. Making a detailed flow chart of the entire app helped me better understand the scope of this project.
Wireframes
Before committing to my initial solution, and creating Hi-Fi mockups, I did the wireframes in Balsamiq to explore and find the best solution to the pain points.
Onboarding
One step on-boarding
The on-boarding process sets the initial expectations from the app and gets the user right into the system with the minimum information needed to get started. The idea was to make the process as frictionless as possible.
Main User Journey 😄
Listings by User — Map+Pricing — Listed Details
Once you select the city, the app jumps you straight to the flat listings. Flats are listed according to the flatmate who put it up and not according to the area. But, there is also a location-based map with available flats pinned across the city. To make scanning faster, flats are pinned with pricing highlighted. If a user likes a listing, he/she can tap on it and check out more details about it. Further, the user can send a message request to start chatting with the listing person and take it ahead.
A user can also list an empty room by tapping on the floating ‘Add’ button from the listings homepage.
Chats (messaging) 🗯
Chat tab is very similar to what you see in any other traditional messaging app. Though this design integrates chat requests sent and requests received on the same page. I wanted to keep everything related to chat on the same page.
Messages that are unread are shown by using the purple accent colour. Every message has a timestamp included with it. The idea was to make this tab feel as familiar and easy to use as possible.
Chats Bot 🤖
Chatting with friends can solve the most complex of problems sometimes. That’s why there is nifty little chatbot integrated with the app. The chatbot gets activated once the user confirms getting a room.
Roomie Bot is actually coupled to solve user’s post-shifting-in problems. According to user interviews, these are some of the common problems that flatmates 🏠 usually had to suffer.
Flatmate stealing things — food, clothes, etc.
Leaving dirty utensils in the kitchen sink
Having house parties frequently
Messy flatmate — dirty clothes, utensils, left-over trash
Flatmate borrowing money for rent
Roomie Bot casually asks if the user is experiencing any problems. If yes, then what are those? For every line of text, automated responses are provided to the user.
Implementation Needs
For this concept to come to work, there is a need to program an automated bot with a human tone. The variables should consist of all the problems listed above and a way to record more problems to increase the database. There needs to be a machine-learning algorithm to understand what users are actually complaining about. A dumb messenger like bot might not work in every instance.
This is a good chance that the user is already pissed at the situation, hence the bot should have a very friendly and calm tone to help the user. Some cues can be taken from Google Voice Assistant and Siri. Roomie Bot is to be looked at as a problem-solving counsellor that is designed for help.
Testing & Prototype 📝
During the design process, I made sure to regularly get feedback from friends.
Simple task list to perform:
Find a city to rent an apartment
Try finding a cheap place
Try talking to someones
Click here to view the project `Roomie`
Tap & transition prototype by InVisionApp invis.io
I believe this concept is a good place to start. It implements good UX practices as a solution to a common problem among folks shifting to a new city, using the technology we have today, and it can dramatically improve the user retention for this kind of apps. By including the feedback bot here, the app can actually be used by the user even after they get their ideal flat and flatmate. Also, return back to get a new one in the future 😉.
Note: This case study was done in Nov 2018.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this case study or have any feedback, ping me at dhananjaydgarg1989(at)gmail.com or connect via LinkedIn. And please follow me on Twitter👋
Tools & Resources
Images — Unsplash
Iconography — Material Design
Mockups — Sketch
Wireframes — Balsamiq Mockups
Prototype — Invision