Institute of Art Design + Technology Dún Laoghaire
Ireland’s campus for the Creative Industries

Lauren Battersby 

MSc User Experience Design

Hi, I'm Lauren! My path to UX began when I started working in Customer Experience in tech over four years ago. I loved gathering user feedback, digging further into this, getting it in front of Product and Design, and seeing its direct impact on our users. This ultimately led me to study UX Design and transition from Customer Experience to Product Management. With a background in property platforms, I decided to touch on a topic I would hear and see renters struggle with - Finding a housemate online. The project uses "cool design" methods by merging the features found in dating apps with those found in property apps to create an innovative solution to this problem.


Is Searching for a Housemate Cool?

Property apps pose a convenient way for users to search and advertise properties in the modern world. While the proptech space covers various new technologies available in online property marketplaces, an area which remains under-researched mainly within this sector is shared accommodation and searching for a housemate. Finding shared accommodation can be a task met with much user frustration. This paper aims to fill this gap and address potential solutions to this user frustration by investigating the use of cool design methods to innovate and bring features from other domains, such as dating apps, to a property app dedicated to the shared accommodation search.