HOUSEME
Mobile UI & Creative Direction for an early-stage rental startup.
As a designer at Houseme, I worked across the platform’s brand and product experience, from foundational identity to web and interface design. Below is a selection of work spanning brand and digital product.
Designing a rental platform built from first-hand experience, with distinct user flows tailored separately for renters and property owners.
The concept for the app grew out of a shared experience with the housing challenges common to Santa Cruz — a city with a well-documented affordability crisis. The goal was to remove as many friction points from the rental process as possible, approaching each feature from either the renter or property owner perspective. This dual-lens approach allowed the team to maintain two distinct sides of the application, each with its own flows and feature set, without overlap or unnecessary complexity for either user group.
Matching UI Design Exploration
Early in development, we explored an algorithmic system for matching housemates based on user preferences. Potential matches were visualized through a connected-node interface, with a detailed view on selection. The key challenge was designing a transition that felt both intuitive and visually cohesive.
Building the Houseme design system from the ground up, grounded in user research and validated through iterative interaction testing.
Creating the Houseme design system was a close collaboration between myself and our UX researcher. Rather than establishing visual standards in isolation, we took a research-first approach — compiling data from user tests to inform the foundational decisions around typography and color before a single component was finalized. From there, we moved into interaction-based testing using early component variants, allowing real user feedback to shape how the system behaved, not just how it looked. The result was a design system built on evidence rather than assumption, giving the broader product a consistent and user-validated foundation to build from.
Selected Work