Category: IDEO Workshop
Roommate Searching Tool for Craigslist
Roommate Searching Tool for Craigslist
Group: Siqi Wang, Justin Berner, Elena Duran L. Meghana Battini
Text by Justin Berner
The product is for students who is new to the area does not have a place to live, but are looking to live with new flatmates/roommates. Currently, roommate-hunting websites primarily present a lot of information about the personality of the roommate and the specifics of the apartment, but they provide little information about the dynamics of the neighborhoods in the area. Our user can thus first discover the neighborhoods in which they would feel most content (i.e. a neighborhood with nightlife, restaurants, parks, etc.) before diving into the personalities of possible roommates.
Design Flow:
After deciding whether they are offering or seeking a roommate, the user puts in a range of prices and possible roommates. Then, they go to a map that has circles overlaid it to represent both number of matches (size of circle) and the most salient feature of that neighborhood (color of circle). The user can be taken to a screen where they can choose from a predetermined set of tags to help refine roommates. Once they have a sufficient number of tags, they can go to a new page with a group of circles with photos of prospective roommates. They can then click on the roommate to see a list of social media characteristics (top songs, top photos, mutual friends, etc.) and then from there they can click a button to contact this person.
The desired feeling that the product should evoke would be someone between the classic feeling of craigslist/newspaper browsing for roommates and the more immersive, navigational feel of applications or social media. It should try to take some of the uncertainty out of this process since it is geared towards those who have little-to-no knowledge of the area.
IDEO Workshop
> Who is your product made for?
For those who have lost, and those who have found what others have lost, our product was meant to facilitate a safe and secure communication between the two parties.
> What’s the existing problem? What’s the need of the user?
People often lose their personal possessions and have difficulty retrieving them, or anxiety around taking the steps to seek them out due to communicating with strangers. Especially if the possession is considered to be rather valuable within society, people can be fished into unsafe situations.
> How does your design solve for it?
Our design contains two separate portals: one for those who have lost an item, and one for those who have found an item. The product itself would then notify both sides of the party if it believes a potential match has been found. Further verification would then occur to mitigate the risk of a false match, and only after this rigorous (but friendly) process would the two parties then be introduced to one another in a chat.
> Walk us through the design flow.
There are two paths that users can take — a path for finding something lost, and a path for returning something lost. The submissions on both ends aggregate to respective community boards/listings, adding to the grander community/cozy feel of the app. The verification process would be gamified through matching exercises for the potentially lost item, and if all is sound so far the two parties come together to converse. The purpose of the app is to facilitate a match between item-owner and item-founder, and make the experience much less nerve-wracking and more fulfilling for both sides.
> How do you want users to feel when they use your product?
We wanted users to feel like they are at home, or a part of a larger community that is compassionate. It can be stressful to lose something, and it can be fulfilling to do good, so to minimize the stress and maximize on the fulfillment would be the product’s goal.
Long Distance Housing Search (Anne, Emily, Puneet, and Jann)
Who is your product made for?
We decided to focus on international students who are coming to Berkeley for a semester abroad and are looking for housing.
What’s the existing problem? What’s the need of the user?
They are looking for housing from their home and need to rent a place to live without being able to visit the apartment or meet the landlord. These users need to be able to trust that they are getting a good place with a reliable landlord.
How does your design solve for it?
Our design emphasizes trust while also trying to create an enjoyable experience for the user that gives them a sense of place and community. We do this by showing the user’s connections to the landlord or former tenants as well as to people who live nearby.
Walk us through the design flow
Screen 1: The left side of the screen shows the listing of available accommodations available for rent. This listing would be ordered by proximity from the “area of focus”. And one of the touch points would be a sliding scale to increase or decrease the search radius that increases or decreases the results.
Screen 2: Circles indicate housing options and show the number of connections you have to the landlord, former tenants, or the area. The larger circles signify more connections.
Screen 3: The user can click on one of the options to expand the connections and see the paths through which they are connected.
Screen 4: This is a detail screen of one listing which the user can save or reject by swiping. Reviews from people in the user’s network about the apartment or landlord would also show here.
How do you want users to feel when they use your product?
We want users to feel excited about the place they are moving to and feel confident that they will be arriving somewhere that they will want to live and that will match their expectations based on the online listing. Our primary goal is to instill trust while also creating an enjoyable and welcoming experience for the user.
IAWorkshop2016: DIBS (Iyer, Lasa, Nazar)
Mood Board can be found here: https://www.pinterest.com/carlooos/interface-aesthetics-ideo-workshop-mood-board/
> Who is your product made for?
Our product is made for someone who has newly moved in town, especially to a university town where there is no shortage of people selling stuff.
> What’s the existing problem? What’s the need of the user?
The existing problem is that there is a deluge of people selling stuff as well as an unseen queue of people lining up to buy these things. Existing solutions like Facebook groups (Free and For Sale) which are a lot more clearer and more trustworthy than Craigslist are still difficult to navigate through and it is impossible to understand if you have any chance of obtaining a product despite your reaching out to the buyer.
> How does your design solve for it?
Our design creates a dibs system that manages queues of users for a particular product. A user can call dibs on any product if she’s first in line but can get dibs if another user ahead of line drops out due to various reasons; some of which are through our system itself. We have a limit of three dibs per user so that the dibs actually translate to buys and do not obstruct other users.
> Walk us through the design flow.
The user sees a list of products on a mobile app and the interaction at the first layer is to call dibs or stand in queue with the availability of other meta information like distance from the buyer and the Amazon rating of the product being sold. Once the user calls dibs, she is prompted to talk to the buyer. But she can still browse through the rest of the list and call dibs on other products that she likes. In case she is not first in line for a product on sale, she can opt to stand in line. For such products the information at the first layer shows her, her chances of getting the product which is based on the anonymous usage patterns of those ahead of her in the queue, in the same way that her buying patterns would be used to decide the probabilities for those after her in the queue.
> How do you want users to feel when they use your product?
We wanted the users to think of this product as a quirky extension of Craigslist and hence, we went with a color scheme that reflects this mentality. We also wanted the browsing to be uninterrupted and the calling of dibs to be choosy and our main intention was to plot at the intersection of these feelings. This decided how we designed the navigation patterns for the application.