Roomie Matching

Company

Yirental

Role

Product designer / UX researcher

Timeline

8 Weeks (Dec.2019 - Jan.2020)

Roommate match is a feature which helps people to find compatible roommates easily and safely based on mutual criteria and similar social networking

Context

Intro to Yirental

Yirental is a digital platform that offers users rental and living solutions in the local community. The mission is to build the most-trusted, high-quality, and professional rental network based on social connections. Since 2017, Yirental has become the biggest rental platform for the Chinese hosts, students, and young professionals who dwell in North America. Currently, it has more than 100,000 registered users and 150,000 app downloads.

project goals

In the Beta version of the ‘seeking roommates’ feature, people could post a listing through our platform after filling out a form. Even though the Beta version was rough, we noticed there was nevertheless a considerable number of active posts related to seeking roommates.

Thus in this project, we decided to optimize the ‘seeking roommates’ experience on our platform in order to reach following goals:

  • Fuel user growth
  • Increase App Engagement and User Retention
  • Potentially direct the traffic to our profitable features

Outcome

Before - publish a Listing on platform

In the Beta version, people could post a listing of seeking roommates after filling out this standard form.

After - Roommate Match

Without wasting time weeding through tons of listings, Roommate Match will provide the user with numerous compatible roommate options based on mutual criteria and similar social networking.

Feature List

As a startup, we didn’t want to build up the something with no market demand. It's extremely important for us to make an informed decision while prioritizing features. To help the team better narrow down ideas, I broke them into themes to avoid choice paralysis.

Define MVP features

After that, I helped the team to prioritize features based on impact/cost coordinates to find out our MVP.

In sum, we decided to leverage our current features (like Community and Friends) to design an enjoyable roommate matching experience.

Information Architecture

Card sorting

After identifying features, we needed to decide what questions we should ask users to help them find matchable roommates. To address this challenge, I conducted a closed card sorting activity. I gave them 30 cards and asked them to put them into three categories: " Top three, "must-have," and "Nice to have" . Based on their feedback, we formed our question list.

See Card Sorting Details
Sitemap

Based on the question list coming from card sorting, I mapped out pages in a hierarchy to help the team understand the structure. This sitemap not only set the foundation for our design, but also helped us better communicate with Dev team and enabled new team members to ramp up quickly.

Feature walkthrough

How it works

Roommate Match will help you find compatible roommates easily and safely based on mutual criteria and similar social networking.
Feature 01

Draw your ideal roommate


Describe your ideal home, Introduce yourself and help us learn your preference synchronously.

Why this feature
People need a more efficient tool to filter listings and to narrow down potential candidates quickly.
feature 02

Check out your matches


See your matches who shared similar backgrounds and fit for your preferred roommate behaviors.

Why this feature
People need to find a trustworthy roommate who sharing something in common
feature 03

Sharable Profile Card


The system will help generate a profile card without exposing the information that you want to protect. You can post it to the public page or other social platforms to connect with more potential roommates.

Why this feature
People need their information well-protected and under-controlled.

People need a more efficient tool to
share listings cross different platform
feature 04

Chatroom


Start talking with your roommate in the Chatroom. Here, you can share the house/apartment you found and schedule a tour together!

Why this feature:
Direct user to our core feature, so that our platform could potentially send house rentals to them.
prototype and test

Rationale behind the screens

Iteration is always my favorite part of the whole design process.  We did four rounds of iteration based on user testing feedback and internal reviews. Here, I want to share some of the challenges uncovered during the process and my design response to them.

challenge 01

How to make form filling fun?


Solution: Split them into single-fields + Visualize the process

Beta Version

This was the current design before we re-designed the experience of seeking roommates on Yirental. As you see, this Beta version:

  • Is just a simple standard form
  • Only covers very basic information related to the house/lease, but the information about people wasn’t taken into account.
First Round
What we did:
  • To respond to users' needs for compatibility and let the system more accurately help users find their matchable roommates, we added more specific questions about people, like sleep habits, gender and age preference.
  • 1

    We broke up the form into a single-field format within three sections: 1. User's requirement for home 2.User's information 3. User's preference for roommates .

  • 2

    We used a figure to visualize the progress of the filling process in section 2 and section 3.

Feedback from user test:
  • 3

    It’s troublesome for people to fill the same information twice in the section about themselves and then about their roommate preferences.

  • 2

    Positive feedback for visualizing the process

Section 01
User's requirement for home

1

Section 02
User's information

Section 03
User's preference for roommates

Second Round
What we did:
  • 1

    Combined “information about yourself” and “your preference for roommates“ sections.

  • 2

    Inspired by the positive feedback from users, we further developed the concept of visualizing the process. To provide responsive visual cues and gamify this form filling process, We came up with an illustrated figure which would change according to the user's different input.

  • Add a standard process bar.
Feedback
  • From user:
    The question list is too long. Some of the questions are just nice -to- have, which could be skipped.

  • Feedback from Dev team
    Our user base is small. Due to limited data sources, we might not find a matchable roommate for the user if there are too many constraints

1

Section 01
User's requirement for home

Section 02
User’s information + User’s preference

Third round
What we did:
  • 1

    We added a bifurcation where users could decide to start matching right away or add more information to get a more accurate result.

Feedback
  • From user:
    Users wanted an overview at the beginning so that they could better understand the steps to come.

  • Internal feedback:
    Thinking about edge cases, how do users feel if they no matches after completing a long form-filling process?

Last round
What we did:
  • 1

    Add Greeting Page to give the user an overview of the whole process

  • 2

    Add illustration by the end of each section to let the user have a break and be clearer where they are in the process

  • 3

    Add illustration for the failure page to reduce the frustration.

challenge 02

How to help people to connect with plenty of candidates while protecting their privacy?


Solution:Let users decide/control what information they would like to share with the public

First round

After the user answers all questions, the system will generate a profile containing information they filled in.As a start-up facing the pressure of user growth, we intended to encourage users to list this profile to the public page in Yirental community. In this way, they could potentially gain more visits and we could get more active posts as well.

What we did:
  • 1

    We set “listing the profile” as default, along with “see matches.” While they check their result, the information they filled in will go public.

Feedback
  • User feel uncomfortable with this setting. They assume it would be private while they fill the questions. Many of them said they wouldn’t fill in any private information (like age, occupation) if they know it would list in public page

Second Round
What we did:
  • 1

    Make it an option people could choose after reviewing all Matches we recommend to them.

  • 2

    Let users lock information they don’t want to share with the public.

Reminder card after user seeing all Matches

User could edit information shared with  public

What the profile looks like in public page

challenge 03

Dating App Vibe or Not Dating App Vibe?


Solution: Create an interface not alike a dating app.

We swung between whether the interface should resemble dating apps or not during the process.

Since we are matching people, we naturally think about whether we could push further and make it more like a dating app( 1st round to 2nd round).

However In the test, user told us dating app-alike experiences for anything other than dating were “weird.” They feel that dating app interfaces come with a stigma outside of dating, which makes user feel “not that much reliable.”

So in the final solution, we took out matching score and be more focused on content itself instead of photo.

First Round
Big circle profile avatar

Second Round
Enlarged the profile picture
+ added a matching score

Third Round
Remove matching score
+ focused on  content

User Flows

Takeaways

Trade-off

Coming up with a design solution for a shipped product requires many trade-offs between business, technology, and various needs of different stakeholders. As a designer, instinct is a valuable gift. But it's also important to have sufficient rationales behind each trade-off we made.

Redline is the key to design implementation.

One of the big things I learned from this project is having a carefully documented hand-off for the Dev team. It's fundamental if you want to make sure your design would be 100% implemented. Many interfaces and interactions might look straight-forward for designers but would be interpreted differently via Engineers.