INDIVIDUAL BRIEF: UNILODGE APP

6 min readMar 28, 2021

We have been given a UX DESIGN brief to work on for 5 weeks.

While working on the brief analysis, we were asked to add the ‘roommates’ feature to the app to help the students find their compatible roommates.

Here are the following tasks that we needed to fulfil in order to achieve the highest marks for the assignment.

Unilodge provides inexpensive student accommodation for foreign and local students in Australia and New Zealand. Unilodge functions similarly to a typical hotel or lodging establishment; however, it has lately been brought to the attention of Unilodge staff that students fail to choose the right roommate, and that incompatible personalities create disputes. Staff at Unilodge saw a need for a new feature called “Roommates” on their current app, which helps students to locate suitable roommates with whom to share their apartment.

As stated in the brief, we had to keep the same colour palette, which is #F7002D, and the same for the typography which is ‘Analogue reduced’ and the typeface.

DAY 1 - MAPPING & SKETCHES

So while working on the primary and secondary goals, I wanted to make the goals very straightforward. The primary goal would be User friendly. And for the secondary goal, It would be easier for the students to access the roommate feature and search for their compatible roommate within minutes and an easier payment method is added for the student to pay for their university supplies.

For the Assumptions, here are the questions are as shown on the left. For example, the main problem that all app may experience is servers may crash and a better way to fix this issue is to send a mail to the IT department on the university for them to fix it as soon as possible.

For the Sprint questions, I wanted to ask the most important points of the app which is the Languages available, what options are available and if the app is user friendly.

The ‘How might we’ questions was more into the application itself.

DESIGNER’S JOURNEY

From the designer’s journey, On the USE section, there’s a lot of sticky notes to work on as shown below

SKETCHES

-From peer feedback, I was able to figure out which layout was the best for the app

DAY 2- STORYBOARD

Here is the best layout for the app.

DAY 3 — PROTOTYPE

Here are some of the steps to create some items. The icons were created on adobe illustrator then exported to adobe xd.

Here I was working on the payment method.

Here is the searched student profile where there is the details about the student and the floor they live in.

-FINAL PROTOTYPE

Here, I created a home icon for the application, then added a fingerprint option where the student can set as soon as he or she finished creating her account. After logging in or signing up, the user will be redirected directly to the news feed layout (home page).

Here is the ‘search roommate’ feature where there’s a lot of option to search for the roommate. Then they will find some students related to the search.

Here is the chat and the location of the chosen student. The student can set the location to see the exact location of the future roommate.

These last layouts are the wallet/payment methods option to split the payment.

And these are the last layouts where there is the covid-19 safety measures layout the messages and the logout option.

DAY 4 — USER TESTING

FEEDBACK 1

Here is the first feedback that I have received. From user 1, he told me that it was user-friendly but the only thing that was bothering him was the size of the font. After that feedback, I have to change the font and make it a bit bigger.

FEEDBACK 2

Here is the second feedback that I have received. From user 2, overall the app was very easy to use and he also pointed that the search section was very nicely detailed to find the most compatible roommate. And the negative feedback was that the news feed was somehow blending with the background, I had to drop a shadow behind each news icon to make it pop out of the background.

FEEDBACK 3

For the third feedback, the user was having a hard some issues with the payment method and also added that the payment method was not enough protected. I then added another screen so that the user makes sure that they want to complete this payment.

FEEDBACK 4

For the fourth feedback, I was suggested to add an edit profile option to keep up with the latest information about the student. But overall, user 4 found the application user-friendly.

FEEDBACK 5