Bunk
Concept roommate matching app for international students.
Mobile App Development, User Research, UI Design
Bunk is a Collaborative Project with Meicheng Jia
PROJECT
Mobile app
Interaction design
Interface design & prototyping
ROLE
User research
Experience design
Interactive interface design
TOOLs
Sketch
Flinto
AE, PS
Principle
Key Features
Find your future roommates!
Bunk lets you easily find the perfects roommate.
You can filter potential roomies by their school and major, spoken languages, commute preferences and whether their dog people, cat people!
What is Bunk?
ABOUT Bunk
Bunk is an app designed for out-of-state and international university students, turning classmates into roommates!
Based on our own experiences, coming to the US as international students and moving across states between undergraduate and graduate schools, we wanted to provide incoming students with a simple and safe way to bunk up with future classmates!
Design Process
Discover
the Problem
There are many apps on the market to look for roommates and share apartments, from dedicated services to instant-messaging groups. None of these, however, address the needs of young students who lack the local network, understanding of the city and who seek a safe environment and social life. Roommate-finding apps seem to (weirdly) over-emphasize physical appearance and often lack the social credibility of larger networks like Facebook or Instagram while social groups for finding apartments tend to get loud and lack necessary features such as filtering by age, location and pet tolerance.
Bunk is designed specifically for students, thinking not only about the rent but the social life, commute (both the morning rush and that late Uber home…) and location requirements of young students. It allows you to find potential house-mates by college, year and major, so that you can find a perfect like-minded match!
Research
USER INTERVIEWs
We start by sending out a Google Survey and got many responses from students from Columbia University, New York University, Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design. We analyzed all the data and here are some key points we found based on our survey:
Key Findings:
Most pressing house hunting concerns: Location, Budget and Safety.
Chat apps (75%) like FB Messenger and WeChat are much more popular than websites (33.3%) and dedicated apps (8.3%) when students look for apartments.
The top concern of female students are the safety are location and security. The top concern of male students are convenience of the building and the area.
Basic Data of our responders:
14 females and 10 males
Age Range: 17-29
5 local students, 9 out state students and 10 international students.
Research
PERSONA DEvelopment
Our target users:
American university students, particularly out-of-state and international students who are looking for apartments and roommates and don’t have a local network.
Discover
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Key Findings:
Lack of Securities
Most of the existing dedicated apps and websites lack functions to verify the identity of users. It is a big concern for international college students who are not familiar with the city and try to look for someone to live with based on online interactions.
2. Wrong Focus
Based on our user research, the physical appearance of potential roommates is the least important concern when looking for a house. However, most of apps we reviewed put too much emphasis on the user’s photo, making them feel like dating apps.
3. Missing Information and functionality
The problem with using messaging apps is the lack of specialized house and roommate hunting features. Users can’t filter and target based on their needs and preferences.
Define
Solution 1.0
Based on the research and user interviews, I started to brainstorm ways to solve the apartment and roommate hunting problem for our target users. I believe an app that has functions for apartment searching and roommate matching will help college students to quickly find the apartments that best match their standard and roommates satisfied with each other. All the users will be Identity Verified as university students before posting any post and chatting with other uses.
Develop
Ideation
Develop
PROTOTYPE 1.0 - QUICK SKETCH
Develop
USER FLOW
Develop
WIREFRAME 1.0
Based on the first round of ideation, I created a quick wireframe of the very first version of the app’s concept and user flow.
Develop
USER TESTING
Missions:
I created three different missions testing three features ( Look for apartments, post my apartment, match a roommate) with 4 different users respectively.
Your name is Glen and you are looking for an affordable apartment at New York, around New York University. Your standards: 2B2B, Laundry in unit, walkable to school in 20mins.
You found a perfect apartment and now you need a roommate to share the rent. Your standards: Male, NYU student, no pet, budget around $1,000.
You post your apartment on the house source list.
User Feedback:
Users can quickly understand the difference of the house hunting and roommates hunting functions and all respond that they are useful features.
Users are confused with button design and can’t find the way back to the previous pages.
Users recommend to add “community” and “save list” functions in order to target house source and roommates better.
Define
Solution 2.0
Based on the research and user interview, on top of the existing functions of Bunk, we decided to add the “School community” function in order to let users find roommates from their school faster.
We also added the “save list” function which allows users to gather their targeted house and roommate sources more efficiently.
Develop
User Journey 2.0
At this point, we decided the main features of Bunk: House source, roommate source, Posting, School community.
I then tried to put myself in the perspective of each user persona, mapped out the user experience, empathized with their thoughts and feelings, predicted problems they may confront, and thought of opportunities to improve the experience.
