Details
Role: Product Designer, Capstone Project.
Duration: 2.5 Month (February 2021 - April 2021)
Fairhouse is a mobile app that creates a solution for managing all household expenses between roommates for new students all across Canada. Simplifying, automating and managing household expenses such as bill payments, splitting costs, records of transactions, and more.
Busy day? here’s an overview (for my TL;DR friends)
Role: Sole & Founding Lead Product Designer, designed entire platform, managed strategizing with business side/stakeholders and building hand-in-hand with the engineering team. This project was a big step in responsibility for me, learned a ton in every aspect of creating a product from scratch.
Duration: 2 Years (October 2021 - August 2023)
Grapes provides a cross-border payment solution in a highly secure, compliant and low-cost pathway. Canadian users can utilize Grapes to leverage instant settlements and payment facilitations directly to their bank accounts or digital wallets without 3rd party intermediaries and extraneous FX and on/off ramp costs. Grapes is growing to be the preeminent cross-border payment solution for Canadians and businesses all across Canada. Raising 1.5M USD and transacting over 100 million CAD on the platform.
New Adults, new responsibilities, new solutions
New post secondary students moving into a single home with roommates have the constant struggling issue of managing household expenses between roommates. Sharing expenses equally among roommates become very messy when all parties are not on the same page. New students have a hard time structuring a payment system between roommates causing missed/late payments, miscommunication and a loss of records on expenses. That’s when the design challenge emerged...
Gaining insight from effected users
To create our solution, I had to understand where the issues lie for these students, I needed to gather real insight. Starting off, I surveyed students through multiple Reddit local university thread groups by asking them to fill out a google survey I had created to share their experience with managing household expenses between roommates in their first year at university/college. I did this to confirm if the underlying issues were true for the majority of students.
The survey had received a total of 153 responses, If you’re wondering how I got these students to participate in this survey, it was through incentive 😄 (amazon gift card to 3 random users who completed the survey).
After that, I continued my research by starting to interview students via in-person or over zoom who are/previously living off campus with roommates to gain insight on their experiences they had gone through as well.
I ran multiple user interviews with students from several different universities and colleges. Through a series of 8 interviews (5 previous students, 3 current students) I was able to better empathize and understand the pain points of their experiences. Some key themes from all the users I interviewed were that there wasn’t really any solution that are specifically made to assist student housing bill management.
Key insights repeatedly mentioned:
Through these user interviews I was able to build a summarized overall persona with the key goals & motivations, pain points and behaviours of these students.
There’s solutions in the market, what’s the missing gap?
I went ahead and searched for the closest solutions already on the market to view the gaps between each app. I ran a competitive analysis and found that all these apps offer nearly the same solutions but targeted more to a general user, which did not create a solution for new and current student’s constraints and issues.
I now had a better understanding of the experience student’s are going through when it comes to managing household expenses/bills between roommates. I now started establishing Ideation questions for what we wanted to improve to satisfy the target user's experience.
Prioritizing main issues
Given the time constraints, I began running a task prioritization workshop listing out all the epics and needed user flows, from there I chose which core tasks I will need to create a prototype with to better showcase my solution to the stakeholders giving them a general understanding on the beneficial use case of Fairhouse to new students.
Creating a solution out of a problem
I started to create the actual product from sketches to building out a complete functioning prototype.
Those sketches started to become lo-fi wireframes that later became a completed fully functioning prototype.
