CMU Roommate Finder
RESPONSIVE WEBSITE: CMU ROOMMATE FINDER
BRIEF
Design a responsive website that addresses problems Carnegie Mellon's HCI students experience in their journey from acceptance to arrival at school.
This project was completed in a two person team over three and a half weeks as part of Interaction Design Studio I coursework at Carnegie Mellon University.
SOLUTION
We focused on how difficult and overwhelming meeting and communicating with potential roommates is. We identified this problem through directed story-telling interviews with current students and creating customer journey maps. Our solution, CMU Roommate Finder, is a fun and easy experience for students and a time and money saver for CMU's Housing Department.
SKILLS
Guerrilla research, directed story-telling interviews, customer journey maps, scenario ideation, wireframing low- to high-fidelity mobile and desktop screens.
TOOLS
Balsamiq, Sketch, Adobe Illustrator
PROCESS
DIRECTED STORY-TELLING iNTERVIEWS
Our team interviewed five students at Carnegie Mellon University about their experiences from learning about admission up until beginning orientation. Using directed storytelling, we spoke to three Master of Human-Computer Interaction students, one Bachelor of Human-Computer Interaction student, and one PhD candidate in Human-Computer Interaction.
NARROWING OF PROBLEM SPACE & CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPS
We used our interview notes to create a consolidated journey map of students' current experience from admittance to attendance. We identified breakdowns including emotional distress when making a decision to attend, frustration finding off-campus housing, difficulty finding roommates and communicating with them, and managing international paperwork and travel to CMU.
We scoped our project to finding and communicating with roommates, since our research revealed this was one of the most painful parts of the journey. We reframed the problem of meeting roommates with a concept borrowed from dating apps, since finding roommates can feel a little bit awkward as well. Our proposed solution, the CMU Roommate Finder website, uses this as inspiration.
We also created a "preferred future" customer journey map, showing how the journey would be different with the CMU Roommate Finder website. With our solution, students build a sense of community early, feel excited about finding roommates, and can easily coordinate and communicate.
WireFrame Iterations
To maximize different viewpoints and iterations, our team split the work of the initial medium-fidelity wireframes. I created mobile wireframes and my teammate created desktop wireframes. Through parallel prototyping, we were able to quickly create two distinct iterations in our first go around.
In the high-fidelity wireframes, we settled on a consistent design for our mobile and desktop experiences. We added the opportunity to fill out a profile and housing preferences before jumping into more personal questions about living habits. From further research, we learned that users desired a higher level of control over potential matches. In this iteration, we removed the graphic showing winnowing matches. Instead, we allowed the user to see all potential roommates, and added a measure of how compatible the profiles are.
FINAL EXPERIENCE
