PROJECT NAVIGATION
Itemate
Easy Communication, Easy Roomie Life
Role
UX Designer
UI Designer
Illustrator
Duration
1 Month
(2021 Oct - Nov)
Tools
Figma
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Itemate is designed to provide a more efficient solution to enhance the roommate’s communication by easy and direct standards sharing for living space and daily items.
When thinking about the word “sharing” in the context of roommates, what do we think of?
User Interview Story
Why do roommates have conflicts on sharing things?
And their different living standards literally lead to…
Desktop Research
Problematic Roommate Life
Among the most common reasons for roommate conflicts, the standard is ranked at the top according to the survey.
And existing solutions are frustrating ...
Most roommates apps focus on task splitting but neglected standard communication.
How might we help people communicate living standards with their roommates in a friendly and efficient way?
Of course, we shall share standards ahead!
Information Architecture
Common living standards to take care
Shared items management ( i.e. damage policies)
Cleaning schedule/tidiness
Move-out solutions
Purchase preferences
User Journey
Story 1 Set up a new group
Share your own standards and check your roommates!
As for the new roomie groups, each will share their own standards following the required modules and they can check other roommates standards later.
Story 2 Purchase together
Share purchase standards to buy expensive stuff
As for roommates who want to buy the furniture or other expensive stuff together, the wishlist would easily allow them to share a preference form.
Design Iteration
Once our design team clarified the user flow, we worked on Figma to explore different iterations of key features and try to figure out the most efficient solution to the problems we found.
Key feature 1 - Visualized standard
Previous Iterations
Selected Design
Key feature 2 - Standards agreement / disagreement
Previous Iterations
Selected Design
Usability Testing
We conducted another test after distributing the hi-fi prototype. 4 out of 5 testing users prefer the final version:
“Now that I feel like it might be easier for me to communicate with my roommates even if we don’t know each other before!”
“ I really like the idea to share each other’s standards ahead! Conflicts often come from misunderstanding you know.”
Features Walkthrough
Hi-fi prototypes
Select your move-out day and start to connect with your roommates!
Set up a item purchase or share standard, customize your standard visually and easily.
Check your roommates’ and your sharing standards of an individual item in the different living area.
Visualize everyone's using time, easily schedule to avoid the time conflict.
Room chatting group makes communication direct and in-time.
Reflection
While this is a 4-week design challenge project, it has emerged from the original topic of “item management“. From our perspective, the idea of managing items is actually managing the relationship between people: whether between us and our deeper self, or ourselves and others. Therefore, we figured our direction to enhance the roommate relationship. However, the initiation was tough. We were trapped by how to trigger effective communication between people who are not familiar with each other? Thus, we encountered disagreements over two different solutions - direct or indirect communication. As each designer sticks to his own stand, we decided to quickly craft two low-fi prototypes for A/B testing and provide data-driven results.
I learned that effective argument is precious. The argument allows us to re-impose ourselves to think for user journey and visual balance, so as to adapt our design to as many user scenarios as we can.
