HOMESTEAD - Home Finder App
Make friends, find roommates, create a happy home
CHALLENGE
Homefinder.com, an online marketplace for home buyers and sellers, wanted to expand its platform to meet the needs of a new home-sharing market. On this new section of their platform, homefinder.com sought not only to add shared homes to their marketplace but wanted to create an environment for roommates to find each other during their shared home search.
TEAM
Nick Friebel & Robert Charnley
TIMELINE
2-week design sprint; July 2019
TOOLS & METHODS
Surveys
Interviews
Competitive / Comparative Analysis
Persona Development
User Flows
Wireframing
Prototyping
Usability Testing
THE PROBLEM
Property-centric platforms
By focusing more on properties themselves, rather than the people and communities users will potentially live with, current home finding sites do not offer users a roommate-centered home-sharing search approach.
Therefore users are not gaining access to the network of potential roommates that would transform those properties into safe and comfortable shared homes.
THE SOLUTION
A people-centric platform
Provide greater personalization of user-profiles that emphasize the compatibility of roommates across a multitude of shared living criteria
Match roommates based on these profile specifications
Leverage the existing mutual connections between users across social networks
Remove the roadblock in the findability of suitable roommates and homes to share currently afflicting the shared home search process.
SKETCHING LO-FI WIRE-FRAMES
We created paper wireframes and tested our MVP concepts during Speed-dating.
The feedback gave us great insight into what worked & what ideas needed improving before we built High Fidelity Wireframes. The concept of deal breakers was suggested to include in the profile matching. Also, people’s individual budgets were a consideration for compatibility. These 2 key takeaways we then added to the new design.
