Gmate

2020

When looking for a roommate, it can be hard to find the ideal match. Especially as a female or femme person, there are certain concerns to keep in mind besides the stress of finding the ideal partner. 

Gmates is a platform designed for females looking for roommates who share values, traits, and lifestyles.

The Persona

The Problem

Carla’s current lease is about to end. She has really been pushing herself with paying her studio in the upper east side. So she’s looking for a reliable roommate quickly to be able to move to a bigger apartment, pay a little less and save some money.

One of my main thoughts for the app was the sorting process and how we could make sure the user found the best match possible, but also the safety was one of the main goals. Requiring an official government ID, employment or education, and a background check was a couple of the things that first came to mind. Through my research over roommates, I learned that responsibility and reliability are one of the biggest priorities amongst millennials and that living with roommates is a growing trend. Just in New York City, rentals make up to 63% of the housing, and 15% of NYC Millenials expect to rent forever.

When thinking about the user flow, I was thinking about how dating apps work. You download the app, register, answer a couple of questions about yourself, and then the app pairs you with possible matches. My thoughts behind this were based on my own experience with people I lived with and people my friends have lived with. Having a roommate is not that different from moving in with a partner, and that’s why we consider it such a big deal when in a relationship. Because If we move in with the wrong person, It can be pretty hectic.

Some of the questions I had in mind were, do you smoke? How do you feel about guests? do you drink? Do you have any pets? How many times do you clean a week? Of course, the list of questions could go on for a while, but something key for the process was to narrow it down to those key points we all have when looking for someone to live with.

Wireframes

Prototype 1

When I first started to lay the visual design down, I wanted to make sure I was incorporating all the colors of the brand. It did seem vibrant and colorful, but after some testing, I was able to pin some readability and accessibility problems, some of them being the gradient on the icons made them hard to read. After receiving some feedback, I was also able to realize the user profile needed some padding since it may be too close to the edge for some devices.

Final Prototype

After receiving some feedback and analyzing the accessibility of my design, I took away many of my original gradients and decided to stick with two primary colors and use the rest of my colors as accent tones for the app. This choice made my final design colorful yet contrasting enough to be easy to read. I decided to go with pink and yellow because usually reds and greens can be related to actions. We can see this with the sage green that is used in certain buttons and the verified icon. I used lipstick red to represent actions like vibe and unmatch.

Reflection

Gmate was a special project for me because I believed in the concept I was developing. To develop a concept for a platform that can empower and help women is truly something that I can do with all the love in the world. My biggest takeaway from this project was how good research leads to an excellent foundation for any project. It was my research that helped me understand the problem and its users.

Project status

I concluded the Gmate project in spring 2020 for my user interface design class. In 2021 I reworked the project to submit in my application for the university of texas in Austin.