Spareroom
Spareroom is a flat sharing and flatmate finder platform across the UK. They help users search and connect with each other to find a suitable place to live.
During the COVID pandemic, people looking to find a new place to live were faced with even more challenges.
Spareroom sees an opportunity in adapting their services to provide an easier means for their users to find places to live and flatmates with aligned personalities and interests to the searching user.
Concept Project | 2 Week Sprint | UX/UI Designer | Website | Group of 4 | Prop-tech
Brief
Make user profiles more engaging and showcase individual personalities more on the platform.
Make the search functionality easier for the users to find each other, while also matching other criteria such as location, price, etc.
Help manage the logistics of arranging meetings/viewings/user interaction and support making these as engaging as possible for the users
Process
Discover
Who are the users?
Define
Identifying the user problem and realising the major key areas of improvement.
Develop
Ideation, testing ideas, conducting design studios, and analysing feedback.
Deliver
Turning designs to high-fidelity, documenting style-guides, and next steps.
Understanding the user frustrations, needs and goals.
Used various methods and tools to help grow empathy and increased the understanding of our user base and their problems.
Arriving to conclusion which key features suite best to help solve the user problems.
Final designing and presenting the processes with a report of the key findings, and a demo of the prototype.
Design Iteration
Sketch
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Mid-fi
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During the beginning of the iteration process, dot-voting was done on Miro, and many rapid prototyping sessions were carried out to plan a layout which had the best clarity for presenting information.
High-fi
Conclusion
Reflection
Considering Privacy
Due to time constraints, my team didn't manage to implement some ideas we had to improve the privacy issue, but I made some sketches which I included down below.
What I learned
Teamwork
I learned how to function in a team effectively and efficiently, skipping the debate and instead relied on testing and insights.
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I saw how creating an atmosphere that encouraged creativity and experimentation helped a team produce its best work.
Feedback
My Experience
I felt this was a fascinating brief, as it was extremely relevant to me since I was also moving houses while completing this project.
As well as it being during the time of a COVID lockdown, I felt that this redesign helped to tackle not only the normal problems you would encounter house hunting during pre-COVID, but it took an attempt to simplify and improve the experience of house hunting with the challenges a pandemic would bring.
Final Prototype
walk-through
Next Steps
Below are sketches I’ve done, and my ideas were:
This was something we touched on mid-way through our sprint, it was really important to us when we got really insightful feedback such as the ones about privacy.
In week 2 of the sprint, I led design studios and dot voting sessions to attempt at tackling this problem. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to properly integrate it into our already mid - high fidelity designs.
Users could see how other users are related to them by mutual friendships
Prompted messages to request more information from users
Checklists to request and approve handing out information
Pop-ups to show which users wanted to connect
Clearer detailed transition of an idea for a privacy feature, that allows users to choose what other users can access from their profiles. My idea was so users can have more autonomy to choose and feel safer by being able to decide what gets shared.
Dot voting session on different sketched ideas to include privacy features when interacting with other users.