Suites
A university-based roommate matching app, changing college experiences one roommate at a time.
What is Suites?
Suites is a university-based roommate matching app, where users who are enrolled in local colleges can login using their university emails to find, meet, and talk to potential roommates before they confirm their decision on the official university’s housing portal.
Project Overview
Problem: As a young adult learning to navigate life in college, it is a necessity to look for a new, welcoming community. Finding a roommate in college is often the first step in fostering a new community, even though current resources set by universities do not allow for a seamless match. So, how can we encourage the right relationships on campus for incoming college students?
Solution: The goal for this app was for users who are enrolled in local colleges to login using their university emails to find, meet, and talk to potential roommates before they confirm their decision on their official university’s housing portal. The app allows a user to create a roommate profile that highlights all of their living style preferences, match with others based on these living preferences, and submit their roommate preferences straight to their staff.
Roles:
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UX Research
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UX Design
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UI/Visual Design
Tools:
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Figma
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Adobe Suite
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Xcode
Timeline:
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Overall: Jan 2024 - May 2024
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Research & Development: 3 weeks
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Design: 8 weeks
Design Process
Empathize & Define
Throughout the development process, I progressed through many stages of ideation, research, designing/prototyping, and building. As an expectant graduate, anxious on finding my place in a new grad world, I first developed an idea to create a roommate matching app specifically for new college graduates, as they learn to navigate life after their college lives in hopes of finding a new community.
As I began to share my ideas with my classmates and professor, I realized there was a more pressing issue affecting the lives of fellow college students. The existing process for finding roommates during our initial years on campus at our university was deeply flawed, with limited options, poor communication methods, and low participation from students.
After implementing research on existing products/apps and competitors, I decided to scale down this idea to help students in our stage of life create their community in the university they live in by narrowing down the selection of choosing a college roommate.
Research & Ideation
After the initial ideation stage, I began to expand my research to potential users by interviewing fellow students about their roommate finding experience at our university when they first joined. I realized how poorly the structure was made, as the platform was underdeveloped, the criteria asked was unclear, and not many students knew about the feature at all.
I sent out user surveys to 28 of my classmates, underclassmen friends, and students attending other universities as well to get a more accurate sample size for my market audience. After gathering the results, I came to the conclusion that 86% of these current students were significantly dissatisfied with the current roommate selection process at their universities, and 94% agreed they would benefit from a more individualized selection process to match with a roommate directly from their school's software.
I then researched existing apps, competitors, and deliverable options to identify the most effective methods for pairing users through matching algorithms. This helped me finalize the ideation stage for a platform that offers a more efficient, profile-based matching process.
Design & Prototype
The next step in my design process was developing the design and prototyping. I researched existing templates and pursued my new idea by creating wireframes on Figma. Once I designed the assets on Illustrator and Figma, I was able to fully develop high-fidelity mockups of my final project.
Build
With my experience with wire-framing, I wanted to go further with this project and bring the app to life in a more interactive way. So I decided to develop my wireframes to code using SwiftUI on Xcode. With YouTube tutorials and troubleshooting with assistance, I built my project on Xcode to develop the app into a deliverable.
The minimal viable product included home page screen with potential roommates to swipe through and match with, a chat feature, and a fully set up profile page for the user.
Next Steps
Moving forward, I would want to continue to make different prototype drafts of the platform on Figma and continue to add more of these wireframes into the app on Xcode.
I would push into usability testing as well to gather intel on improving functionality during this building process, while also open the possibility to collaborate with my university for real customers, proper testing, and receive proper customer validation.