RESEARCH, CONCEPT, UX, UI, IDENTITY, ILLUSTRATION

The idea for HOMR came about in a design school class about user research. The assignment was to create and pitch a product that filled a practical need for an audience based on collected data. My classmates and I narrowed in on issues involving roommates because we’ve all had roommate pain points. To figure out our problem, my classmate and I took a list of questions and a recorder to the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta. We interviewed about 20 students and asked them about their roommate situations. The biggest problem we found was that roommates who were the master tenants had issues collecting money for rent, utilities, and other split expenses each month. Chasing roommates down for cash caused tension and was a time suck for busy students. So we created HOMR, a simplified bill paying platform that splits and pays bills to make tenants only responsible for their own share of the bills.

Our pitch deck, gamified design, and idea caught the attention of Y Combinator in 2010. We even had a meeting with Harj Taggar who did not choose our project, but gave us advice on how to move forward. We did look for development partners, however the search eventually fell apart. The technology to manifest our idea wasn’t impossible, but difficult and perhaps a few years away from being reality. Furthermore, the original team was spread across the country. As the lone person from the group living in the Bay Area and new to the world of creating apps, I didn’t have the experience nor foresight to push this idea forward on my own. It took a few more years in the Bay Area, and another idea with a business partner to finally take a concept to an MVP on the App store. And in regards to the feasibility of app based banking features, in 2024 the HOMR platform would not be an issue to create.

This project was my introduction to user experience research and I learned a lot from the entire experience. We took the research and created wireframes for a product. I created the brand identity and designed the user interface.