Simplify shared living, one task at a time
Client
WG Buddy
Year
2024–2025
WG Buddy is a shared living management app built for my M.Sc. in Usability Engineering at Hochschule Rhine Waal, designed with two teammates to solve the everyday friction of German WG (Wohngemeinschaft) life — splitting expenses, coordinating chores, and planning meals across a shared household.
We ran structured interviews and built personas across nine shared-living profiles, then moved through paper prototypes, tree testing, and high-fidelity prototypes validated with Maze across 10 participants. The result is an all-in-one platform for expense splitting, chore rotation, and collaborative grocery and meal planning — built to replace the patchwork of apps (Splitwise, WhatsApp, sticky notes) most shared households cobble together.
Scope of Work
PROJECT BRIEF
Role : UX Designer
Responsibilities:
Wireframing
Documentation
Information Architecture
Research
Design Systems
Prototyping
Timeline: 4 Months
Project type: HSRW Project
Students and Newcomers to Germany face problems when they are a part of the WG system.Due to a lack of services available in this context an all in one solution is needed
THE PROBLEM
Managing a WG live can be strenous due to different people from different backgrounds coming to live together in one shared space
The Wohnengemeinshaft system of germany is the equivalent of living in a PG but due to different people coming from different countries with different living conditions come together to live in this system it can lead to problem of managing chores and other duties this can lead to an unwanted dispute amongst the people living together from the perspective of purchases duties and other miscellaneous activites that are generally seen when you live in a multicultural household
THE RESEARCH
Before we started going into the design phase we needed to understand what types of problems do expats generally face while living in a WG system and the usability of solutions that they are using to solve these issues
For this Project based on the given timelines we started doing research in specific domains things such as Market Research Interviews with Persona forming alongside Surveys
Competitive Market Analysis
We found out that in the market there were different apps solving different problems but there was not one for all solution made to Manage a WG situation and that the communication amongst other members of the household was distributed into various apps that not all users were familiar with using
User Survey Insights
Based on a initial user survey conducted amongst University students we found that many students were using multiple apps to anage single tasks also that they were feeling Overwhelmed ,angry and frustrated in managing the household alongside the other things in life such as studying or jobs
Persona Study Insights
here we created groups of personas that shared common problems to understand common pain points that were seen amongst students this enabled us to understand the problems that are crucial and needed to be addressed in the solution being created the problems ranged from maintaining cleaning schedules to managing finances amongst the household members
THE SOLUTION
Something to help manage the Chaos of WG in a simplified easily accessible manner
Based on the responses and pain points observed by the team we came to a conclusion that there needs to be a tool that can be used to manage the household expenses, inventories and schedules so we started with brainstorming for solutions and landed up on creating a app that can help in managing the household and essentially includes the basic necessities that can be used by all members of the household
Ideation
Based on the pain points observed we had to start categorising the problems into categories to make sure that the solution covers all these categories and aims to resolve these problems in the application. The categories were "Groceries & Food", "Task Management" and "Finances". These three categories were most relevant and needed proper solutions this was based on the research conducted on participants needs and the current solution they were using to take care of their needs.
Low Fidelity to High Fidelity
Once the flow of the designs was finalised then came the fun part "designing" we started off with drawing out the layouts for the screen and tested them amongst our classmates to increase the intuitiveness of the screens and make sure they were comprehensible then after refining them we started on making Mid Fidelity screens then transitioned into making High Fidelity screens on deciding that we can add themes to indicate to the user which category they are visiting we allocated colour schemes for every 3 category based on trends seen on multiple platforms .
Testing and Feedback
After the High-fidelity screens were finalised we needed to test them out amongst real users . Through testing we were able to identify the areas that were difficult to access by the users either through the UX writing or the flow of the application the testing was also done to ensure that the users were able to relate with the features of the application and that they found the features to be useful in general. The Usability tests were conducted via the maze platform amongst university students
