Background & Objective: Roomi is a shared housing platform focused on creating a safer and easier way to find room rentals, sublets & roommates. As the sole product designer at Roomi, I was responsible for leading the full product lifecycle features from user research to prototyping and user testing on mobile and web platforms.
Impact: Designed and validated search, message, online booking features on the web and mobile app.
Time: 6 months
Skills: User Research, UX, UI
Customer Journey on Roomi
At Roomi, I had the chance to work on product features across multiple touchpoints on a user's journey of finding a roommate, both on the supply (lister) and demand (mover) side. For each of these features, we released an MVP version and iterated upon feedback. Below are a few of the features I worked on closely with the product and engineering team:
Onboard: safety first
Background & ID Verification: We worked with different vendors to provide the ability for users to get background and ID verified to build a safer community.
Search: empower decisions
Listing Types: We added different listing types to accommodate the various types of new rooms being added onto the platform, included shared rooms, private rooms, and entire homes.
Browse People: In order to empower all users with the ability to reach out to potential roommates of their choice, we opened up the ability for anyone to browse for person (not just listings). This feature was especially useful for listers, who could now reach out on their own without waiting to be messaged by movers.
Browse People Feature
Message: better conversations
Chat Requests: These served an additional layer of friction to promote more quality conversations. Instead of receiving a direct message from a mover, listers received a "request to chat" (which could be accepted or declined) that included high level information from the mover about what they were looking for in their search. This helped listers narrow down from a large number of requests to achieve a more productive queue of potential roommates to chat with.
Education Screens
Book: lock it down
Online Booking: Roomi historically has been a platform focused on the search and discovery phase of finding a roommate, with little visibility into what happens at the later stages of the moving experience. With Online Booking, the mover pays a small service fee for Roomi to act as an escrow by accepting and holding onto the first month rent until successful move-in is confirmed. Measuring this action helps track the team's most important KPI (confirmed move ins), as well as builds out a sustainable opportunity for revenue. After releasing the feature and getting feedback from users, we learned there was a gap in explaining how and why it should be used, and built screens explaining how this worked through both a marketing campaign and in app education screens.
Online Booking