ZoomRoom
A New Approach to Finding Roommates
Problem Definition:
For many young people starting out their adult lives, they will often try to save money by living with roommates as opposed to renting out an entire apartment by themselves. Often times, and especially when moving to a new area, a person may not know enough people to fill and entire home with, or may be looking for a short-term sublease.
Currently, there aren't many options for people in this situation trying to find a vacant room in an otherwise filled unit, or those who have a vacancy opening up and wish to find a new roommate to join their apartment or house, as most sites are catered towards people seeking to rent an entire unit, or people looking to find new roommates to then look for a apartment or house with.
Screenshot of a typical Criagslist housing search
Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace are two of the current options for people searching for vacancies in apartments and houses, but their interface and experience is rather primitive and does not provide many tools or filtering options, which can add additional stress for the user to a sometimes already stressful situation.
Design Solution:
Based on my own experience in this particular situation, a major feature that I wanted to include in the design for this housing/roommate finding site was to have the primary method of viewing search results to be on a map overlay as opposed to just a simple listing of search results. Especially for those living in the city, being able to see the specific location of the unit is often one of the most important criteria, and it can be frustrating for the user to have to sort through dozens of listings, only to find out that they are not located in any of their desired locations.
In addition to making the use of a map overlap, some other features I wanted to include are:
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Advanced filtering options
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Ability to save search criteria for future searches
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Ability to create alerts for when new postings matching saved criteria are listed
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Ability to customize geographical filter to filter out listings from undesired geographical areas.
From the landing page, the user first selects whether they are looking for a vacant room or have a vacant room they are looking to fill. If the user selects that they are looking for an available room, the user then begins a search by filling out the primary search criteria including:
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general geographic location
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the number of bedrooms they are looking for (if search with friends, more than one bedroom might be desired)
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the minimum rent
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maximum rent
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the user's gender (some people have gender preferences for their roommates)
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desired move in date
From the main search results page, users can see all of the results of their search on the map overlay. From the left side of the screen, the user can:
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add additional optional filters
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save those search parameters for a later time when they search again
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create an alert to be notified if and when there are new listings posted that match their saved search criteria
Users can use the "Area select" tool to create a custom geographical target area. By allowing users to customized filtering criteria and designate custom geographic locations, and create alerts for when new units become available, the process for finding a new residence with roommates can be streamlined and made much less stressful for the user.
Upon clicking on one of the search results, a preview of that unit, which had originally been conceived as a small pop-up, now slides in from the right side of the screen displaying some images of the the unit, and some of the important details including cost, unit size, and move-in date. The use can click on the "heart" icon in the top right to save it to their favorites to view for later, they can choose to send a message to the current tenants, or they can click "See Full Listing" to expand the preview and to display the entire listing.
With the expanded full listing, the user can see all of the detailed information of the listing, all of the images of the unit, and can either send a message to the current tenants to arrange a meet up or viewing, or can return the the search results on the map overlay.