manage your home — myh app

When you share a house, you don’t just share a space, but also tasks, expenses, shopping lists, and some of the time, even good times!

6 min readJun 2, 2018

This is the motto of my Interface Design project, where I’ve idealized a concept for an application iOS that allows you and your housemates to get organized with all the things that end up messing after a while.

At the moment, although there are many applications available in the market, when we look for something with all the functionalities together, we are faced with the lack of them or the lack of development of either experience or visual.

The principal target of this app is students and young adults, not belittling other users. This is because the real estate market is getting more expensive, making it difficult to live alone having to resort to shared houses.

The purpose of this case study is to share the process of this project, in which I present the app “myh — manage your home”.

I had the following user story as a starting point:

as a student sharing a house with two other colleagues, I want to add a bill, which will be divisible by everyone and has a payment deadline, so that my colleagues at home will keep track and we will have a better organization.

Then I start making a site map so I can organize the entire application and what it contains. At the same time, I did some sketches of medium fidelity and a moodboard to establish a look and feel as well as organization ideas, layout and usability standards.

I switched to hi-fi wireframes, given the defined user flow, and to set the appearance, I also started working on the application icon and home screen.

With visual, layouts and copy decided, I went to the mockups and prototypes, showing below the final result.

create or join a home

When start using the application in addition to having to log in or signup, you have to create a house or join an existing one. To create one, just enter the name you want to give the house and the currency you use. To join an existing one, it must be through the code that was provided to you by your house mates (available in the application settings) or a shareable link, and the currency you use. Each user sees all the values in their own currency, making it easier to use when people from different countries share the home.

creating

The home page starts by showing us the name of the house, and the possibility of changing the house we are in (if we share more than one house). Housemates, shows us all the members who share the house and gives us the possibility to add more by sending a link to the person to add.

And here starts the good stuff. First, we have the Priority division, for defined elements. Then show us the tasks we have to do.

In all screens we can easily create a task, an expense or a shopping list by clicking on the central button of the Tab Bar.

When we create a task, we are presented with suggestions of common things to do around the house, filling in the title and the description. If the task is not repeated, we have the option to share it with the members of the house. If it is repeated weekly, for example, we can select whether it is rotating and by whom it will run and with what order. After this, a timed notification will take it from there and let each housemate know when it is their turn.

If we create a shopping list, it will have a title, a text field for annotations, who it is shared with, and the possibility of adding a purchase deadline (for a dinner or weekly purchases) and priority. After this, add all the items you need. If you forgot to add something, no problem, just go to the list and continue adding.

In expenses, we must enter the name of the expense (gas, water, etc.), the total amount, by whom it was paid (the user who creates is selected by default), whether it is equally divisible or if someone will pay a higher percentage and by whom it is divisible. Finally, we can set a deadline for homemakers to pay, receive notices when the deadline is coming, and if it is a recurring expense, it is possible to determine when it is repeated.

tasks

The tasks screen is divided into three, these being upcoming tasks, all scheduled tasks (if they are recurring, it only appears the next time the user will have to perform) and finally the supplies, having all the saved shopping lists , whether personal or shared. In the upper left corner, there is access to the archive, showing all the tasks performed in chronological order.

expenses

In the expenses screen, we can see the balance between the members of the house, and expenses that have not yet been paid. To see all expenses made, you can consult the tab completed.

Within the view of an expense, one can consult for who is divisible, who has already paid and the deadline if assigned.

All expenses, tasks, and shopping lists can be edited by everyone. However, the edits would appear in a history.

We can always eliminate what we have created.

We can only send notifications on the elements we’ve created, and they have a time limit until they can be sent again.

settings and chat

In the settings, we can change our profile, that if we did sign up with Facebook or Google, it is filled already. We can also change and view the settings of the house, such as the name, share link, view the list of members, etc.

As it is important to listen to the user, there is a section to ask for features or improvements and to report errors.

Lastly, there is the message section, which focuses on being the means of alerting the members of the house, whether it is tasks that are assigned to them and the time has come, or the deadline has expired, or payments that have to be performed and in this way we can alert and avoid less pleasant situations.