Share your apartment with someone in need!
Overview
Team: 2 UX/UI designer, 2 Web Devs, 1 Data Analyst
My role: UX/UI Designer
Tools used: Figma, Miro, Trello, Slack
We never know what curveball life could be throwing you tomorrow. Whether there is a war breaking out, a nature catastrophe, or you just need to flee your abusive partner, every day lots of people find themselves in emergency situations where they have to rely on outside help for shelter while they get their lives back on track. Luckily our world is also full of kind and generous people who want to help and who have empty space in their homes or even an empty apartment that they want to offer for a short term to a person in need.
This project was a collaboration MVP project where we wanted to create a platform where we can help connect people who are in need of emergency shelter with people who can offer their space for someone in need.
FINAL SOLUTION
THE PROBLEM
Anyone of us could find themselves in a sudden situation where your home is not available to you anymore and you need to find a place to stay for a short term while you figure things out. The internet is a huge place where it can be very hard to navigate and find information on where to find a place to stay. Outside of emergency shelter facilities that can be in cruel conditions, there are very few options for help. This same goes for someone who wanted to help and offer their space for someone in need. In Europe there are very few platforms where someone could offer their space for charity help.
RESEARCH
We started our research by looking what there is currently to find on the European market for emergency shelter. We found that there are some platforms that focus on specifically Ukrainians because of the current war and some housing platforms such as housinganywhere.com and Airbnb offer emergency listing options but they either are hard to navigate or offer very little information and security. The website that we found the most competitive and comprehensive was the Shelter.app which only operates in the United States.
COMPETITORS ANALYSIS
INTERVIEWS
We conducted interviews with people in need of shelter and one expert on the subject who manages a shelter house for Ukrainians in France.
One of the main struggles was the fear of having to change location (city) many times and if there was no available shelter option available in the area and if the person has kids it’s hard to keep their life as balanced as possible.
As this was a very difficult topic we had to handle ourselves with extreme care to make sure that our subject feels comfortable during the interview.
IDEATION
TWO PERSPECTIVES
When ideating about the architecture of the app we had to keep two perspectives in mind for the flow. We are building a platform that will have two types of clients coming from very different environments. One flow will be from the perspective of the person who wants to offer their space and upload a listing. The other will be a person in need of shelter and searching for a place to stay.
FROM MID-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE TO FINAL SOLUTION
STYLING AND CHANGE OF BRAND COLORS
Our first color scheme was a dark and warm red with the idea of adding a gamification aspect to the UI, however, going further with the project we noticed that the colors did not work as well as expected and during our user test we noticed the need for a cleaner UI and color palette. This led to the complete shift in brand colors from red to blue to provide a calmer user experience.
Keywords: Clean, Friendly, Calm
