As part of the Coursera/UC San Diego Interaction Design capstone project, I designed a mobile application called Tility. But it didn’t start as an app, with a name, or a design.
It started with a problem.
I had spent much of the summer watering my garden due to a dry summer. I kept wondering, “How much am I spending on water this year vs last year? How do the environmental impacts of watering weigh against the positives of eating fresh, local, organic produce? How much water do my neighbors use?”
When I tried to find out, I had to start digging through my “paper pile.” That didn’t work well. I tried logging in to the websites of my utility providers. But i had to first find the account numbers. So back to the paper pile. It was such a pain that I gave up.
Tility solves that problem.
You set up one time by describing your home and family size and linking your utility accounts.
After that single setup setup process, you can repeatedly check your overall utility usage — electric, gas, and water.
You’ll receive grades for environmental friendliness and cost overviews for budget questions.
The app is designed to be very simple, as shown by this basic storyboard.
And it was tested to make sure that anybody can use it.
As I got further into developing the app, I posted it to Usertesting.com, a website that provides user testing services. I learned a lot from my users, despite some setbacks with my prototype’s hosting environment.
In fact, all of my users got stuck on the step shown below. I had added what I thought was a cool interaction — enter a number in a text box, the click the button. But none of the users understood that they had to click the button and they grew increasingly frustrated trying to figure out how to move past this step.
For me, this was a valuable personal lesson: just because it’s cool, doesn’t mean it’s usable. The best designs are practically invisible — not an opportunity for a designer to show off. I plan to remember that lesson in all of my future design work.