HiRoomie App

Overview

Roommate issues can sometimes make or break a college experience. Often, they are due to problems with communication or confrontation. HiRoomie is an app that I designed as part of a UI/UX course in Spring 2017 to help roommates communicate and keep track of shared responsibilities and events.

Target Users

College students that are in shared living situations

My Role

I was one of two designers of this app concept. I collaborated with my partner to create the end-to-end design of the app, from user research to wireframing to prototyping.

The Problem

My co-designer and I conducted user interviews throughout the design process in order to verify and modify our assumptions about how people would use our app. In our sessions, we asked students about their biggest roommate frustrations and had them walk-through our mockups while narrating what they were doing out loud. Some common issues that we heard included: 

• “I feel pretty awkward asking my roommate to do the dishes”

• “It’s kind of hard keeping track of groceries”

• “I’m not sure how to delegate chores among all my roommates”

• “I’m not very confrontational, so I feel uncomfortable reminding my roommates to do their chores.”

Project Goal

Based on our user feedback, we figured that a prominent source of roommate tension was scheduling and delegating chore responsibilities. We decided that our app should act as a middleman or even impartial mediator among roommates by centralizing all assigned responsibilities and providing a remind function to poke a roommate about an unfinished task.

Ideation

We started by listing all of the features we wanted in our application and then created wireframes and mockups to fit those features into a user interface. We soon realized that there were too many features to complete within a limited timeframe, so we ended up settling on what we considered to be the three most important features: Task Tracking, Calendar, and Grocery List.

Onboarding

One question we needed to figure out was how to help roommates find each other and form groups through the app. Inspired by the flow of certain online multi-player games, a roommate creates a group and receives a unique code that they send to their roommates to invite them to join.

Task Tracking

The Home screen of the app lists the most urgent outstanding tasks and events in the roommate group. We added an “Events” section because we also wanted to incorporate a social aspect and help roommates bond and plan events together. By default, only the top two reminders and events are shown on this screen due to limited space; more can be shown by clicking “Show All.”

There are several user flows on this screen. Users can check off tasks that they have already completed. They can also send reminders to “poke” the person(s) assigned to the task in the form of a device notification - this was inspired by Venmo’s remind function and is a milder alternative to direct confrontation.

Users can also create and delete new reminders and events. One challenge we faced was trying to fit these functions onto the limited real estate of a phone screen. We solved this problem by using icons to represent actions and adding a “swipe-to-delete” interaction.

Calendar

New reminders and events can be created either on the Home screen or Calendar screen. Specific roommates can be assigned to tasks and invited to events.

Grocery List

Another common problem that college roommates can struggle with is knowing what shared groceries or household items to buy, so we added a shared grocery list feature to the app.

The Product