Housemates: simplifying communication in a collaborative household
Living with people isn’t always easy. There’s a lot of communication and coordination involved. “Who’s paying the rent?” “I took out the trash last week. It’s your turn.” “Do you mind if I have people over on Friday?” “Who has the Netflix password?” Can we create one place where roommates, families, friends, and anyone linked to the residence can communicate about it and what goes on there? Household members need a way update each other through a single message forum to leave notes, send reminders, and discuss household issues. They need a way to list and track household tasks and who’s responsible for them. They need a way track, communicate, and coordinate events at the residence and of its members. And wouldn’t it be great to easily control the residence’s smart devices?
Housemates, an app for your shared household
Communication in a shared household just got easier. With Housemates, you have all your household communication and device-control in one place. You can send private messages to an individual household member or start a group chat with everyone. You can start conversations about events and tasks before they are put on your shared task list and calendar, and all tasks and events are ‘pending’ until approved by everyone involved. As a housemate, you have the ability to accept or decline tasks or events at the house, and start a discussion about it. You assign tasks or events to yourself or other housemates and set reminders. The house calendar can sync with individual members’ calendars, so you have all the information for both your house and housemates in one place. You can access your smart home devices easily, setting temperature, adjusting lights, or controlling the TV. Instead of hopping in-and-out of WhatsApp, Wunderlist, Google Calendar and the like to communicate and organize, you’ll have one place to go for all your household cooperation.
With Housemates, you have one place to go to get all the tools you need to run your residence with ease.
Development & Testing for the ‘Housemates’ App
After a Heuristic Evaluation: Prototype V1
The first prototype was based off a storyboard that had a user accomplish two tasks: (1) assigning and sharing a household chore and (2) working with a shared calendar and messages about a new calendar event. The first prototype saw the development of major screens: User Home, Tasks, Messages, Chats, and Events. Also, general navigation and flow for the app were created.
I wanted the interface to feel familiar and ‘easy on the eyes’, so I used familiar icons and limited the text as much as possible. I also wanted the navigation to feel intuitive so I created a navigation bar anchored to the bottom of the screen.
After In-Person User Testing: Prototype V2 & V3
The tasks from the first prototype were further refined in order to help a potential user navigate with a specific aim in mind: (1) creating a household task and assigning it to a household member and (2) chatting about a new event at the house and adding it to the shared calendar. The screens most important to completing tasks were focused on in this and subsequent prototypes.
From in-person testing, I found that the location of the navigation bar of the app was simple, but it wasn’t entirely intuitive. The location and look for the ‘Menu’ icon was updated — placed in the top-left, an area that was more intuitive to the user. Also, the location of the ‘Add’ button being built into the navigation bar led testers to look hard for this feature. The ‘Add’ button was redesigned with more contrasting colors and relocated outside of the navigation bar. The ‘Messages’ and ‘Chat’ sections were merged together. The ‘User Home’ screen lacked a direct way to view ‘Messages’, so in order to help the user reduce the amount of clicks on the menu icon, the ‘User Home’ screen was redesigned to include ‘Messages’. Lastly, new features were included in the ‘Add Task’ and ‘Add Event’ screens.
Two versions of the prototype were developed for A/B testing three important changes: the ‘Menu’ location, the ‘Add’ button, and the redesigned ‘User Home’ screen.
After Online User Testing: Prototype V4
Online user testing returned split results, two testers preferred A while two others preferred B. Despite this split, users found the ‘Messages’ section on the ‘User Home’ screen (prototype B) easily and avoided the menu icon all together. Testers reported that the Menu for prototype A was “easy once familiar with it.” Yet testers didn’t comment on the Menu for prototype B, and flow through the tasks was much faster than for prototype A, especially with the addition of the ‘Messages’ section. The change to the ‘Add’ button was much more intuitive and the testers didn’t second guest themselves.
From online user testing, one major change to the prototype was a change to the flow of the second task. While this isn’t a major cosmetic change, this change creates two ways to complete the second task depending on how the user approaches it. This change also makes it so that events added to the house calendar are pending approval from housemates before being confirmed (this is similar to how tasks are added to the task list).
The task flow for the second and third prototypes was: check house calendar> talk to housemates about future event> add event to house calendar.
The update for the final prototype has changed to include a second, more direct way to start a chat about an event: check house calendar> add pending event to house calendar> talk to housemates about future event at household and get approval.
Final Prototype
The final prototype includes the updated ‘Menu’ navigation, ‘Add’ button, and ‘User Home’ screen that testing showed improved the app’s user experience. It also includes the new, alternative way to flow through the app to complete the second task. Previous designs did not focus on colors but rather made important features prominent through contrast, so the final prototype has received a colorful facelift. You can view the prototype on InVision at https://invis.io/J499D9PPK or watch the video on YouTube at https://youtu.be/yEoWkuUQYFU.
Further Testing and Additional Features
Given that this is only a prototype, there are many features that I’d like to see added in the future. The following are a list of future ideas that were outside the scope of the project for the course.
Further Testing
- Location and flow for the ‘Start Chat’ for events and tasks
- Very clear distinction between chats and messages; two other terms have been recommended: conversations or discussions
*Note: An icon has been added to the prototype to help users visually discover the Chat/Messages section.
Additional Features
- Dashboard for all users, showing success of task completion
- A project-like task approach where sub-tasks can be added to a lead task (this would be beneficial for a shopping list, for example)
- Send reminders/notifications of upcoming tasks and events
- Overdue task warnings
Coursera’s and UCSD: the Design Lab’s Interaction Design Specialization
This project was completed for the final course and Capstone project for Coursera’s Interaction Design Specialization. The 8-course specialization was created by The Design Lab at UC San Diego and courses were presented by Scott Klemmer, Elizabeth Gerber, and Jacob O. Wobbrock.
Interaction Design Specialization: Remix Submissions
I participated in the Remix Project, where students were given the opportunity to work off other students’ previous work and ideas. I’d like to thank my fellow classmates for their brilliant work and influencing my own.
Thank you to Christopher Griffin for his Ideation submission, Glanceable Collaboration in a Shared Household, Prasitha Thomas for her Prototype Assignment submission, Arvind Kumar Agarwal for his Heuristics Evaluation submission, and Justin Wong for his A plan and a skeleton submission. I also contributed heavily to the remix submission pipeline and worked off my own submissions: Overly thorough Heuristic Evaluation (remix submission), Develop a plan and begin a design (remix submission), Testing-ready Prototype (remix submission)), Tested & Redesigned (remix submission), and Housemates (remix submission).
