A co-living app that matches people by their interests

ROLE

PRODUCT DESIGNER

SERVICES

UX/UI, Product Design, App Design, Design System

Goal

Design a co-living app that matches on interests, professions and the mood of the house. Light and modern, black and white with one accent.

Problem

Coliving and Cohabs have no app at all. Airbnb and Booking sell a room for a few nights and say nothing about who else is in it.

The product has no app

Coliving and Cohabs run on the web only. Robert rates his service 4 out of 10: no mobile app, poor design, hard to browse.

Rental apps sell rooms, not people

Anna gives Airbnb 7 out of 10 and still leaves. It books well and does nothing for sharing a place with people she has not met.

You cannot tell who is in the house

The same question comes back at three steps, the main screen, the house page and the house itself: who lives here and what are they into.

After the booking the product stops

Once you are in, everything shared is scattered across chats or missing: events, common zones, cleaning, the people next door.

Research

Benchmarking

I went through all four competitors from the brief and put every function of each into one table against what Union Space would need.

Coliving and Cohabs have no app, only a website
Airbnb and Booking cover search, booking and payment, nothing after
None of the four lets you see who is in the house before you pay
Eighteen functions of fifty five exist only on our side

Competitor summary analysis

Competitor analysis

AirbnbBookingColivingCohabs

Interviews

Two in-depth interviews: one on coliving.com, one on Airbnb. Different countries, the same gap in both answers.

What i understand

Know who is in the house before paying
An app that is pleasant to look through, not a website
A service built for shared renting, not adapted from travel

In-depth interviews

2 respondentsKey pains3 takeaways

Personas

Four personas from the brief and the persona analysis. Three of them ask for the same thing: neighbours with matching interests.

Personas

Scope

Deadline 1 January, budget $20,000. Scope was decided by the value column: 5 is in, 4 gets in if it serves the interests idea.

Tasks

From brief and tech spec to a clickable prototype: research, a teardown of 55 functions, flows and CJM, the app map, screens in both themes, and a design system.

What counted as done

A screen was finished when it was built from design system components, carried both themes and covered the states the flow needs.

Timeline

Brief, research, the function teardown, the app map, screens, the design system, then the prototype. Eighteen unique functions landed in the first pass.

Process

Brief and spec

Read the brief and wrote the tech spec: the full list of screens, flows and functions

CJM & User Flow

Analysis

Went through all four competitors, Airbnb and Booking in the app, Coliving and Cohabs on the web, and mapped every function of each against what we would need

Competitors

AirbnbBookingColivingCohabs

Structure

Built the app map and the flows before any screen, starting from the split between finding a house and living in one

Screens

Designed the app on that structure, in both themes: interest and mood filters first, residents above the booking button, the house unlocked after booking

Design system

Primitives, a semantic layer in light and dark, and every component bound to it, so a theme is one mode switch and not a repaint

Design system

57 primitives26 semantic tokens61 components bound

Prototype

Built a click-through prototype of the main flow and walked it end to end before the visual pass

Hypotheses

[1] Match by interests

Hypothesis

If a house can be filtered by what the people in it are into, then choosing a place becomes choosing a crowd. I drew the filter first, and the interviews backed it.

Solution

Interest and profession tags on every house and every resident, wired into the main filter, plus a residents sheet with profiles and direct messages.

Impact

The nomad wants neighbour profiles with interests and jobs, the freelancer wants people with a similar way of life. Covers four functions no competitor has.

[2] Mood of the house

Hypothesis

If a house shows its mood and residents keep it current by voting, people can tell what the evenings look like before they pay. Interests do not change, the mood says what tonight is.

Solution

A mood on every house card and a mood screen inside the house, set by the residents and filterable from the main screen.

Impact

Covers three functions neither Airbnb nor Booking has, and answers what the journey asks at three steps: what is the atmosphere here.

[3] The house after the booking

Hypothesis

If everything shared sits on one screen, the crowd you picked has somewhere to happen. The house functions belong to the people living there, so the screen sits behind the booking.

Solution

Your house screen: events with the option to create one, a note for the house, the group chat, the health of the house, and extend the stay.

Impact

Turns the app from a booking tool into the thing people open while they are living there.

Wanted to build

[1] Group planning

Everyone in the group votes for the place they like, and the booking follows the vote.

[2] The city around the house

The house screen links out to what is happening nearby, so the place comes with a neighbourhood, not just a room.

Implementation

Sign-up and first entry

Kept the flow to what people already know: a phone number or an e-mail, a code, or one tap through Google or Apple
Made sign-up optional until payment: people open this to check prices, and a sign-up wall at that moment scares them off
Drew the error states in, wrong code and code not received, with the support bot on the same screen

Search and the main screen

Put search, filters and the map on one screen, because Robert named it outright: hard to look through what is available
Added interest tags and Choose a mood as filters of their own, next to city, dates and price
Kept the top offers in the area on the first screen, so an empty search still shows something

House page

Opened with the photos and the 3D tour, then the technical details of the house: internet, shared zones, size, minimum stay
Put the residents, their tags and the mood above the booking button, because that is what people were choosing on
One price and one button, terms visible before the payment screen, because overpaying is the fear the journey names at booking

Your house

Gave the house its own screen after the booking: health of the house, residents, events, notes and the group chat
Put extending the stay and moving out in the same place, so the end of a rental is not a support request
Kept the chat one tap away from all of it, since talking to the host is the most repeated action after booking

Result

Union Space went from a brief to a full product: research, teardown, flows, structure, screens in both themes, and a design system of 57 primitives, 26 semantic tokens and 61 bound components.

Eighteen of the fifty five functions exist only here: the mood and its filters, the residents sheet, the events, the health of the house, the group chat.

What I would measure

Nothing shipped, so there are no numbers. I would watch four steps: touching an interest filter, opening the residents sheet, finishing the booking, and coming back to the house chat in the first week.

Learnings

Both people I spoke to could already book a place. Neither could find people worth living with. The profile took twelve passes: I started it as account settings and it had to end up showing what a person is into.