Creating Harmony….
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an app to encourage inter-household communication
“Shared living would be much more convivial, if communication and collaboration were seamless. Every click is an obstacle, this communication should be available at a glance.”
Glanceable Collaboration in a Shared Household by Christopher Griffin
This article details how the app, Harmony was designed and developed as part of the Interaction Design Specialization through Coursera at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
The initial design work for this project was based off the following students work: Jennifer Carden, Justin Wong, Jennifer Carden, Arvind Kumar Agarwal, Prasitha Thomas, and Christopher Griffin. I’d like to thank them for sharing their work with the other students. Links to their projects can be found at the end of this article.
The Beginning
Initially I created a series of paper prototypes based off the work of Prasitha Thomas. These prototypes developed the concepts initially outlined by Prasitha, but I also explored how to implement a chatbot into the app experience, something which I felt would help Prasitha’s app.
I wanted to test different methods of chatbot interaction. Developing a kind of chatbot interaction was difficult when working on paper, especially when prototyping. Because of this I decided to do some Wizard of Oz prototyping with people using Slack. Participants would join a three way conversation, with me acting as a chatbot helping users to set tasks in the app. After each session I would discuss with participants how they felt the experience went and see if they had any suggestions on how to improve it. I ended up choosing a similar method to that of Arnav Patel outlined here:
Here is a screenshot of one of the prototyping sessions:
Parallel to running these experiments, I also participated in a heuristic evaluation of my paper prototype with two other classmates. This gave me some great feedback in areas that needed improving in my app.
Creation
From these evaluations I was able to further refine the design and produce a wireframe prototype, and undertake several iterations. During each iteration, I took more of the notifications and added them into the home screen. This operated like a standard chat app where you scroll through personal messages, weather, and news all on the same page.
I created an A and B version of my design — one with clear labeled icons and one without and uploaded these to Usertesting.com to do A/B testing. I thought the labeling, although a little cluttered, would help to improved task completion speeds. This proved to be the case and I changed the design as a result.
Final product
Below is a link to the prototype via Invision
References:
- Jennifer Carden’s Develop a plan and begin a design (remix submission)
- Justin Wong’s A plan and a skeleton — Glance
- Jennifer Carden’s Overly thorough Heuristic Evaluation (remix submission)
- Arvind Kumar Agarwal’s Heuristics Evaluation — Glance
- Prasitha Thomas’s Prototype Assignment — Remix Project (Glanceable Collaboration in a Shared Household)
- Christopher Griffin’s Glanceable Collaboration in a Shared Household
