Rice University Design-a-thon 2024, 2nd place out of 300+ participants!
Background
Finding the perfect roommate in college can be a scary experience, especially from hearing numerous horror stories of terrible roommate pairings. This led us to question, “How might we save undergraduate students time and effort on finding compatible roommates?”
27%
Out of 14 top challenges college students face, roommate relationship issues ranked among the highest. Cited by 27% of students surveyed (SWNS, 2023).
We built Nest after research showed roommate conflict is a top stressor for college students.
To dig deeper, the team ran a Google Form survey of 20 students plus live interviews, finding that 90% cared about cleanliness, 70% about sleep schedule, 85% about personality, and 60% about interests and guest frequency. Interviews also revealed a recurring emotional problem: students felt guilty rejecting a housemate in person after chatting for a while, since incompatibility often wasn't clear until they met. Looking at existing options like Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and Reddit threads, we found them low on trust and personalization, confirming the need for something better.
And a gamified personality quiz, inspired by tests like Myers-Briggs, generates a "living type" and compatibility score early on, so incompatibility surfaces before guilt-inducing rejections happen. Quiz questions were pulled straight from the data, like a dish-cleaning scenario built from the 60% of students who complained about messy housemates.
Product
We built a gamified personality quiz, inspired by tests like Myers-Briggs, that generates a "living type" and compatibility score early on, so incompatibility surfaces before guilt-inducing rejections happen. We pulled quiz questions straight from our data, like a dish-cleaning scenario built from the 60% of students who complained about messy housemates.