CoLife: Building trust through transparency
My Role: User Research Lead | Sprint Length: 2 Weeks
Project Status: Complete
CoLife is a co-living service that works by pairing hosts and guests who have completed a preference survey and background checks. Hosts and guests are then shown each others’ profiles a la Match.com and can choose to match and ultimately live together in a landlord/roommate relationship.
Problem space
High attrition during signup and matching.
Why do people sign up and leave?
Our Solution
We unpacked the site with hosts and guests and found that a beautiful site was undermined by confusion and a lack of credibility.
Based on what we learned, we redesigned the site to improve usability and trust.
Design Goals
Improving access to support and improving readability and credibility in communications. CoLife doesn’t have an app, so polished email and SMS experiences are crucial.
We made:
A FAQ page
A fixed-position contact overlay for live support
Recent stories to indicate active users on the service
Arrows to indicate page scrollability
Accessible font size guidelines
COVID-19 transparency information
7. Entirely new onboarding copy
8. Graphical step-by-step onboarding emails
Revised Landing Page
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Research
We started by putting users at the core of our design.
We learned their demographics and experienced the site from their point of view. In this case, it meant assuming the role of senior citizens in addition to digital natives.
Then we learned from their experience.
We interviewed 5 hosts and 2 guests and systematically identified the common threads across all 7 conversations.
Their insights became our design
They told us that they had trouble trusting the site and some wondered if anyone was even at the wheel.
They told us that the site seemed buggy (it wasn’t).
Communication impressions ranged from annoying to confusing. Many saw a lack of transparency in fees, but everyone loved the lady on the phone. They had their doubts, but the individual attention made them feel heard.
They told us that they didn’t know how the signup and matching process worked or what was required.
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Design
1: Low Detail
We brainstormed how we’d address each feature.
As an Agile UX team, we collaborated and improved on each other’s ideas so that we committed ourselves to the best solution.
We picked the best idea for each feature, revised it, and made it part of our MVP.
Recent Stories Idea
COVID Transparency
Recent Stories Idea 2
Contact Overlay
Recent Stories Revised
Revised Contact Overlay
2: Medium Detail
Mid-Detail Usability Results
We tested our prototype and communication copy with users.
Users showed us that:
Original buttons didn’t appear responsive, resulting in duplicate notifications.
Original pages didn’t look scrollable.
Our new emails were too text-dense.
Our “Recent Stories” graphic made the site trustworthy.
Color and contrast made the site usable.
3: High Detail MVP
High Detail Usability Results
We made changes and tested our final MVP with more users.
Users showed us that:
Images in the welcome instructions slowed users down and increased comprehension.
Pricing information near every sign up button increased trust.
Users found signup links at the bottom of the page confusing or frustrating.
Takeaways
Color and contrast are more than aesthetics and accessibility: they’re usability. We learned that these can completely make or break a site.
Details matter (see above). Using a component design system is essential as you refine details and hand off to developers.
UX writing is more than usability- it’s brand, emotion, and credibility.
UX means authentic inclusion. Authentic inclusion means going beyond convention and never assuming. When we told users to scroll, we opened the site to a new user base.
