Dwelln

Dwelln was developed in a business incubator course I took while in college. The idea was based off of the founder's bad roommate experience during their freshman year.

The basic idea of Dwelln was to create a better and more modern way of finding a roommate, as options at the time (2021) were out of date and out of touch. Nothing else on the market was specifically catered towards the person that you would be living with- they all seemed to focus on the space rather than the actual roommate themselves.

Role: Design Lead
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Focus: UX Research, UI Design, Brand Design
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Year: 2021

The Problem

1. Current avenues of finding roommates are unsafe, uncomfortable, and outdated in terms of technology and design.

2. Most competitors focus on the property or the physical space you’ll be staying in rather than the person you’ll be living with.

The Question

How might we create a roommate finding experience which highlights and prioritizes the person rather than the property?

How do we facilitate mindful decision making when it comes to choosing the person you will be living with?

Dwelln is a secure and reliable roommate finding application with an algorithm made to help users find their perfect roommate based on their desired criteria.

The features of the application are made with the intention of users being mindful and slow in their roommate finding approach. The goal is for users to find someone that they can live with, with little to no friction.

Low-Fi Prototype & Testing

In the first version of our product, we tested our idea of a wheel based system with our class. Users would be presented with a small amount of people who rotated on a wheel rather than disappearing after swiping one way or the other.

Wheel, Chat, Arrows, and X & Check Buttons

The goal of the wheel was to showcase to users that who is being presented to them is on a rotating wheel, and swiping left or right does not mean yes or no.

The goal of the chat button was to see how users will function with this button.
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The goal of the arrows, check, and x buttons were to see if these buttons allow users to understand that the arrows do not mean yes or no. You have to click the check or x button in order to say yes or no.

Student Survey

After our low-fi test, I created an A/B test and surveyed my Instagram followers with the two options. I asked this question:

Which of these do you find more visually appealing?

My actual question was whether or not people prefer to make choices about their roommate based on what they look like vs. who they are as a person. I kept this question within my notes and in discussion with the team, but wanted to try to keep the survey unbiased.

The Results

Out of 104 participants, 71% chose Option A (photo-focused) and 29% chose Option B (information-focused).

The preference of a photo-focused profile system felt too similar to a dating app. Though received in a positive light, it did not accurately represent the true ideals of the experience we desired to create.

Moving forward, we decided to embrace the more personal, characteristic-based profile route despite the positive survey response for the other option. Given the verbal feedback from some recipients, the reason why Option A was successful was simply because it was more visually appealing.

Our challenge then became how we could move forward with the preferred aesthetic experience while keeping away from the addictive nature of swiping.

Mid-Fi Prototype & Testing

By this time, we started to map out the sign-up process and features involved in order to track ease of set-up. We wanted to ensure as best as possible that users would set up as much of their profile as they could before viewing potential roommates without it being too overwhelming.

The team had some conversations regarding how sometimes when setting up an account on a new app, they skip a lot of the questions. So the goal became figuring out how to make it approachable enough for people to actually fill out their profile, and without forcing them to do so either.

Easy & Approachable Set-Up Process

Goal was to see if the ease of set-up would facilitate profiles having a higher rate of completion. We took a casual language approach, and tried to have few questions that were easy to click through.

University vs. General Public Location

Goal was to reach a larger user base without alienating a whole segment of users who are in need of this product. The two could not be on the app together, as university housing is of course exclusive to university students and not available to the general public.

Profile Completion Bar

Goal was to encourage users to complete their profile by adding a percentage bar at the top of the page.

High-Fi Prototype & Testing

After A/B testing and mid-fi iterations/feedback, we came up with a hybrid option which more clearly highlights what the user looks like, but focuses more so on important things one might need to know about their potential roommate. We did this through target market surveys which gave us important information on what people find important about who they live with.

About Me, Needs, & Convo Starter

In the About Me section, users can add a bio. It shows a limited amount of characters which would be expanded when user clicks “click to expand”.

"My Needs" are what we found through our research to be some of the most important things people look for in their roommate search. Things like their location, how many roommates they are looking for, if they have a place to stay already or not, etc.

Following the likeness of the typical prompt sections on a dating app, we created the “convo starter” feature and purposefully left it on a cliff hanger of sorts to encourage users to expand a profile before moving on.