Unilink Share is a mobile app that helps college students match roommates & locate off-campus housing. It is created by Ailink Tech Corp., a student-founded tech startup at UC San Diego.
"I took the initiative and conducted the much-needed redesign by myself."
Earlier this year, I was invited by Mr. Mu He, founder of Ailink Tech Corp., to join the team as the Product Manager for Unilink Share, the company's main product.
Unilink Share was at its market entry phase when I joined. My main mission is product refinement & scaling, aiming to significantly increase daily active users (DAU) and transaction success rate (TSR) by the end of Q3 2020.
By looking into the MVP, as well as conducting user interviews, usability studies, and competitive analysis, I discovered a few pain points that our current users are facing. These pain points can be resolved with a better design. Nevertheless, currently, the team does not have a dedicated UI/UX designer for the task. Therefore, I decided to take the initiative, filling up the white spaces though conducting the much-needed redesign by myself. The next release of our product, which implemented most of my redesign, is already at its beta testing phase and will be hitting the market within a month.
I started my process by understanding the product's ultimate goal: What problem is it trying to solve? What goal our users are trying to achieve by using our product? What is their motivation?
By looking into the company's mission & vision statements, pitch decks, as well as the need-finding survey conducted by the company's decision-makers previously, I arrived at the conclusion below:
<aside> 💡 Users wanted to locate an apartment that reasonably suits their needs at the cheapest price, though an extremely easy-to-use product.
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That is, our users value a quick & pleasant experience and the ability to find the cheapest housing the most. Still, they wanted their apartment to match their needs/requirements other than the price as much as possible.
Now I am clear about our user's goal, it is time to make sure our product offers just that.
To see whether our current design is able to effectively support our users in achieving their goals, I first ate my own dogfood — I played intensively with the mobile app myself and recorded my own concerns.
I then conducted a series of practices to help me further identify areas of improvement as well as validate my educated guesses from dogfooding.