RoomOwl
UI/UX Design • User Research
Role
UI/UX Designer and User Researcher
Team
Myself, Jasmine Lin, Kendal Arellano
Timeline
October-December 2022
Tools
Figma, Miro
The Problem
Every individual has their own desires when apartment searching. Add additional roommates into the mix, and finding the perfect apartment for everyone becomes even more of a difficult process.
Our Approach
Use a recommender system to analyze each individual’s desires in an apartment and find options that meet the criteria of every roommate group that searches together.
Mood Board
The first step in our design process is building a mood board to establish the style and incorporate elements that would be useful for our recommender system.
Recommender Systems
Personas
Card Sorting Analysis
We created the cards based on characteristics from our personas and then created categories for others to sort them.
This helps us understand how to organize the information architecture and see how people perceive information groupings.
Explore our Miro board here.
Ideation
From our research insights, we found patterns of where users group features together and used these patterns to shape our information architecture.
Due to the fast-paced class, we jumped straight into high-fidelity designs and rapid prototyping after gathering insights from card sorting.
Visual Design
High-Fidelity Designs
Key Features
Browse group or individual recommendations based on user preferences
Group recommendations consider all member preferences to provide apartments that match individual needs
Favorite locations to save for later
Explore our prototype here.
Reflections
As one of my first full UX projects, I learned about the research process and how important it is to organize the interface based on user input.
I also thought it was fun to experiment with different forms of user research, such as card sorting, to get helpful insights that guided our design decisions.