FlatMates was the final project to a Design Thinking course at TAU. Its goal was to tackle an issue experienced from a personal perspective and try to come up with a way to solve it. We chose to focus on a problem we knew very well: Living as young students in Tel Aviv while struggling to find the right flatmates:
The Problem
Many people struggle finding appropriate flatmates to share their space with. They end up living with people they don’t get along with just to save money on living expenses and have no way of knowing who the person they are going to live with really is until moving in together. Moreover, In the past few years, Tel Aviv has become one of the most expensive cities in the world, making this problem only more and more apparent.
The Solution
Our team came up with FlatMates: an app that helps connect flatmates based on common grounds such as Hobbies, Interests and Personality.
The app would try to give the user a better idea of the person they are about to share a space with before actually moving in together, preventing unnecessary frustrations.
Research Phase
Market Research
From the market research we conducted, there seemed to be sufficient talk about finding the right flat, but not enough talk about the necessity of finding appropriate flatmates.
User Research
We conducted qualitive and quantitive research in order to better understand the issue at hand and help create our user personas:
Survey Highlights:
Stated it took 4+ months to find a Flat
Gave up on a Flat because of its Flatmates
Would rather get an ok flat with good flatmates
User Personas
Information Architecture
User Flow
Low Fidelity Wireframes
High Fidelity Wireframes
Designed Screens
Onboarding Screen
We thought it was important to set our app apart from other apps with similar goals by emphasising FlatMates’s unique approach to finding the right flat, from the very beginning.
Set Flat/Flatmate Preferences
Setting Flat and Flatmate Preferences help filter less relevant options and allow the algorithm to work its magic in the way that best suits the user.
The user sets their preferences once when setting up their account, and can later access it from the preferences button whenever desirable.
Home Page
The home page contains different categories that refresh the feed with the most relevent information according to users’ preferences. It’s a hub that shows the user a summery of everything they need to know, while still allowing easy access to the app’s other pages.
User Profile
FlatMates user profile features different fields that allow each user to fully customize their profile in a way that lets everyone know what kind of person they are and what kind of lifestyle they lead.
❌ The only uncustomizable feature being the Lifestyle section, which is determined by your past Flatmates’ Ratings.
Discover
The Discover Page is an endless flow of different user profiles. Similar to those on dating apps, it allows you to swipe through profiles of other users, based on an algorithm and your own set (Flat & Flatmate) preferences that determine which profiles you get and filter out irrelevant profiles.
Review System
After Living with a flatmate, the app will ask the user to rate the experience of living together and evaluate the flatmate on different lifestyle aspects such as cleanliness level, the amount of time spent inside the flat, etc. These evaluations will sum up into the data appearing on each users’ profile and are unchangeable.
Flat Page
Once The user decided a certain flatmate is potentially appropriate, they can check out their flat on the flatpage, or send a message via chat to get things going.
Usability Testing
The final step was to test the first iteration of the product on real users that fit our persona in order to draw conclusions and improve out final results. We tested the prototype using 20 different users and asked them to follow 5 basic tasks:
We observed our participants, allowing them to express their frustrations and encouraging them to Think Aloud:
Analyzing our data, we came to some very Improtant coclusions:
Several Users claimed the registration process was longer than they would’ve liked. We agreed the process shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes.
Users asked What happens when several flatmates are involved. We acknowledge It’s a common scenario we have to address.
Some users wanted to be able to “look together” in sort of a Co-Op mode. We saw it as an opportunity to add this feature in the future
What’s Next?
I like the final product, but it’s still far from perfect. After fixing the current issues at hand, I realized we should implement more features to help users keep using the app, even after they find a flat or a flatmate. We brainstormed some ideas for future features we thought could help achieve that goal:
