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I had an unpleasant roommate experience, and I observed these issues widely among college students. An unhappy living environment can cause serious mental problems, I wonder how I can help? With this empathy, this is Harmony App's journey started.
Design Lead
- Research , design
- Development planning
- Design System
- Redesigned the final UI
2 Product Designers
1 Researcher
6 Months
Side Project
0-1 MVP Product
Product attend Y-Combiner startup school
National report shows that:
More than 60% of college students are dissatisfied with their roommate.
Disappointing dorm experience causes 63.5% of students to frequently or occasionally feel lonely or homesick.
Work in Progress
Work in Progress
Work in Progress
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Harmony is a mobile app that helps people to manage their roommate life, It helps them set up ground rule that respects each other's living habits, and proactively remind them to keep them.When they encounter some potential issues, the app encourages them to confront the problem in the early stage and solve it in a friendly way to prevent the conflict to grow. It helps improve their consideration of their roommates.
As the one who initiated the project, I completed a project roadmap at the start to help the team align with the plan and milestones.
We reviewed 15 reports and articles related to roommate issues to find the direction of our solutions
We did market research and reviewed 10 roommate related mobile and web systems to find opportunity areas
We sent our 30 surveys to college students to understand what contributed to their dorm tension
We interviewed 6 college students from 5 university, ranging from freshman to senior, to understand their stories and needs
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After compiling detailed quantitative data, we summarized our findings to answer our research question: what causes roommates tension？
Image you are moving into a room smaller than your closet at home and you have to share it with someone you’ve never met…
Based on all these insights, we summarized our design principles and set this framwork for our future design work.
Comforting
Cozy, warming, and providing a safe environment
Caring
Understanding needs and providing guidance to solve them
Encouraging
Fun and cheerful
Effortless
Frictionless and under control
Home Rule builds common ground between roommates on what should be observed in the home such as quiet time and guest rules
Chore List allows roommates to distribute different tasks such as cleaning the bathroom and washing dishes after discussion
New Request encourages roommates to resolve problems at the early stage
And we will focus on this feature next
We did 6 rounds of user testing in different fidelities with 20 participants. We iterated based on feedback and previous research insights.
As we move into the high-fidelity design phase, We have done more user testing to ensure that the design can motivate people to get their job done. Surprisingly, we uncovered some unpleasant moments when users were testing our app. We decided to make the features more fun and less heavy.
