Roomtask — Key to a healthy roommate relationship
Introduction
Living in a house with other people can be great! There’s a constant company, support, and fun! However, that means everyone has their own responsibilities in ensuring an appropriate living space for all.
Roommate relationships can get complicated especially if they have different living styles and habits. Whether or not you’re also best friends or family, there is a constant balance between having fun and doing your part for the house. I believe that a chore-splitting app for roommates will be helpful to primarily college students living in apartments because they can easily keep track of everyone’s house tasks, efficiently split assignments, and earn rewards for completion.
Therefore, I envisioned an idea for an app that people can use to efficiently split up tasks, avoid roommate confrontation and conflict, and get chores done around the house in a fun and organized manner.
Needfinding
I conducted two 15-minute interviews with a convenient sample of people: my hometown friend who attends college and my mother. These interviewees are different in age, background, and likes/dislikes. However, both interviewees share their living space with multiple people — making them perfect participants in answering the following questions!
Interview Questions
- How often do you use your phone? Do you write down reminders or use a to-do list application to help you keep track of tasks?
- Please tell me about your experience in doing chores with your housemates.
- What are some challenges you face when negotiating tasks around the house? How often do you face these challenges?
- Walk me through what an ideal scenario would be when doing chores around the house.
- How do you feel about constantly reminding your roommate to complete their task?
- Would you feel relieved if you could view everyone’s progress on their assigned task?
- What would motivate you as a roommate to complete your own tasks?
Interview Results — UX Personas
UX Persona #1: College Student — Stella (Primary Target)
UX Persona #2: Parents / Family Members — My Mom, Kabita (Secondary Target)
Goals
The following goals were written after discussing wants and needs from the UX personas above.
- Registration: When making a profile, you are answering questions about your living habits, your home, and your preferences.
- Roommate agreement: Whenever you add a roommate, they must accept and read your profile. Your profile contains the answers given in your registration will then be given to your roommates to read and together you discuss compromises to make sure everyone understands what is expected of them. This agreement is then signed.
- Splitting Chores: Splitting chores can be done by room and/or person. Assign a list of chores for a specific room and assign a list of chores to yourself and other people.
- Progress: Like a diary or a status bar on Facebook, you are able to type up a quick note to record your progress on a specific task that will be visible to all your roommates.
- Reminder: send a reminder or “nudge” to a roommate to make sure they remember to complete a task.
- Rewards System: Completing a task earns you 1 point. Accumulating these points can allow you to redeem gift cards and coupons.
User Stories and Flow
According to the key features and interview results, I made several user stories that align with each key feature. The priorities were listed based on the goals the UX personas above would like to accomplish first before others.
User Stories
As a new user:
- I can register a new account. (HIGH PRIORITY)
- I can answer questions about my living habits and environment. (HIGH PRIORITY)
- I can add and connect with roommates. (HIGH PRIORITY)
- I can sign a roommate agreement. (MED PRIORITY)
As a general user:
- I can sign in. (HIGH PRIORITY)
- I can assign tasks to different rooms and roommates. (HIGH PRIORITY)
- I can log in my progress of a task to update my roommates. (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
- I can send a reminder to my roommates to complete their tasks. (HIGH PRIORITY)
- I can redeem rewards for completing my tasks (MEDIUM PRIORITY)
User Flows
I designed some user flows online to illustrate the steps to complete the user stories written above.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
As I started first designing the interface of the app, I wanted to start with wireframes. Wireframes helped me create layouts and skeletal frames to investigate the “flow” and interactions with titles, buttons, and images in order to complete user stories.
Critique
Some helpful feedback suggestions from my peers:
- Add features to show user finished tasks late, or even ignore tasks
- Unclear to who can assign tasks
- Add roommate feature — there is no screen to see current roommates
High Fidelity Wireframe and Prototype: Draft #1
Revisions
I added a screen where “Current Roommates” could be seen, and made it clear that anyone can assign tasks to anyone. However, I did not add a feature where it can show the user has forgotten or ignored a task (I later address this in my Final Prototype).
I had a lot of trouble picking color schemes during the creation of the High Fidelity Prototype. I originally had chosen yellow, purple, and green. However, I was not happy with the way many screens looked with this specific color scheme. As I tried out different colors I realized a gradient of navy blue looked very appealing. However, the issue was that my home screen and logo heavily relied on the yellow purple, and green palette. Manually changing and creating a whole new logo was going to take too long so I made a screen where users can choose which “Color Theme” they would like their profiles to be in. From there, I implemented the navy blue while the home screen still was using the original colors.
Critique
After some peer and professor critique, I was advised to:
- keep my back buttons consistent. Some screens had the back arrows, some had “x”, while others did not and were only presented with the hamburger menu.
- Make the two dots signifying the two different Task Views clearer.
- Add a “Help” button or more instruction in the menu search option for tasks.
- Change name from “progress feed” to “progress chat” as that was what it essentially was: a group chat.
- missing “states” in my first draft — some examples such as invalid username/password cases or invalid purchases of rewards.
Final Prototype
Revisions
I removed unnecessary and redundant back buttons, added empty/error states, renamed the “Progress feed”, made the two dots below “House View” and “Task View” larger, and provided more instruction through overlays.
Overall, I really appreciate the feedback I received. Critique is so important in creating a successful interface because you don’t know if it actually works until others test it out. Although this app design has many more ways to be improved, I’m happy to show my friends and family what I’ve created to potentially in the future help their roommate and house-work trouble!
Links
This article was written in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Fall 2020 section of DMD 3035 — Interaction Design at the University of Connecticut, Digital Media & Design Department.