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URoom: Designing a Roommate Finding App for College Students
Giving students a stress-free way to find their perfect roommate.
Project Results
App for college students to find potential roommates by sorting through housing preferences and chatting with other users.
Our goal is to make the roommate-finding process for college students easier by removing the safety risks of using other platforms, and by making it easier to find compatible roommates that match their lifestyle and housing preferences at their university.
What is the problem?
Competitive Analysis
We looked at other roommate finding apps on the market to see what features they lacked, and how we might address those needs in our platform.
None of the competition had college specific features like viewing fellow students and university housing preferences.
Needfinding
We conducted surveys and interviews to see how students are currently finding roommates, what students look for in a roommate, and frustrations they have with their roommate search.
4 interviews and 26 survey responses
Interviewees cited living habits and personality traits as the most important factors in choosing a roommate.
Example Interview Questions:
Can you describe your best roommate experience?
If you had to go through the process of finding a roommate again, what would you do differently?
What aspects do you prioritize when looking for a roommate?
How well do you need to get to know a potential roommate before agreeing to live with them?
Nearly 80% of surveyed students said that their university does not offer a platform to find roommates
Example Questions:
What apps have you used to find a roommate?
What do you care most about when choosing roommates?
What are you concerned most about when choosing roommates?
Persona
Based on needfinding results, the following persona was made with user needs in mind.
Affinity Diagram
In order to better understand our interview responses, we created an affinity diagram, sorting the notes taken during interviews.
Interview responses were sorted by the interviewees’ roommate preferences, and their roommate search process.
Participants mainly cited living habits (such as sleeping schedules, cleanliness, smoking etc.) and personality traits (like respectful, and friendly) as important factors in choosing a roommate
When searching for a roommate, participants cited differences in how they went about choosing roommates during freshman year and their upperclassmen years.
What factors were most important for finding roommates?
Ideation: How Might We Statements
We brainstormed a list of "How Might We" statements to help our brainstorming process for potential features to include in our roommate finding app. We used dot voting to sort through and pick out the most popular feature ideas.
How might we show whether potential roommate is considering other people?
How might we show if potential roommate is trustworthy?
How might we show if potential roommate has similar living habits?
How might we show roommates with similar personality traits?
Brainstormed Features
Information Architecture
Using our brainstormed features, we mapped out the information architecture of the roommate finding app. This included the Explore page, that included a filtering button for profiles, and a list of recommended profiles for the user, a profile page where users can showcase their housing preferences and information, a chat page for chatting with potential roommates, and a favorites page for liked profiles.
Prototyping
We started by creating low fidelity prototypes of pages from our information architecture. Then we established the design system, such as standardizing button designs, icon set, color palette, and other important components of Uroom. Finally, we incorporated the design system into our prototypes to create the final high fidelity mockups.
Explore Page
Profile Page
Living Habits Matching Quiz
Sample Quiz Questions:
How often do you dust?
How often do you wash your dishes?
How often do you do laundry?
How often do you throw out the trash?
Design System and Component Library
Final Outcome
This project turned the chaotic, stressful search for a college roommate into a clear, simple, and guided experience. Grounded in extensive user research and detailed personas, the final 70+ screen prototype directly addresses the core needs of students. The design provides an intuitive and effective path for users to move from a wide search to a compatible, successful match.
Takeaways and Next Steps
Conduct Usability Testing
Add more features for finding university housing
Conduct more user research for upperclassmen