Casa — Keep Home a Happy Place
Creating an App for Chore & Bill Distribution
If you ever have lived with roommates, you’ve probably experienced some problems with distributing chores and bills. For example, the living room could be messy and dusty because nobody wanted to clean it or you were supposed to clean the dishes but left them piled up for days because of your schedule. These could lead to some awkward conversations with your roommates. Our team thought this is a great problem space that we might be able to help those people who live with housemates by creating a solution to keep track of chores and bills as well as turning this experience to be fun rather than something you have to do.
In this agile project, 2 other teammates and I came up with design solutions in 2 weeks. Here is the UX Double Diamond that we used to explore problems by Research, Synthesis, Ideation, and Prototyping.
UX Double Diamond
Research
Before starting with our usual research method, user interview, we took a different approach this time and looked into what platform to design for, and which a potential partnership we may pitch for. In addition, we made competitive matrics to identify where in the market our product will stand for.
Platform — iOS
We decided on iOS for the following reasons:
Mobility
- The convenience of hand-held devices
- More accessible — spontaneous user interaction
- Immediate update of task completion
Product / Business
- Fewer previous versions to create
- More profitable — attractive to potential company partner
Partner — Venmo
Venmo stood out to us as the potential partner because of the following reasons:
- Send money easily via a mobile device
- Social aspect
- Expand the business model and user market share
Competitive Matrics
We looked at many many apps that are both individual and group task focuses, as well as utility-based and game-based. We identified our product as a group distribution app that has features for both utility and game aspects.
Synthesis
Then, we had user interviews with six people that we screened from our survey. After going through a few rounds of Affinity Mapping, as well as gathering several “I” statements, we pulled some research insights and craft a persona.
Research Insights
- Want an easy, shareable system that will improve communication
- Value timeliness, shared workload, and systems that work
- Find it hard to be responsible, and maintain a shared system over time
- Find it easier to discuss bills than chores
- Find it awkward to confront each other to remind them of chores
Persona
Here are the main goals and notable pain points.
Main Goals
- To distribute chores in an organized way with everyone following through long term
- To avoid any awkward confrontations with housemates regarding chores and bills
Notable Painpoints
- Not having an agreement on a system to maintain.
- Awkwardness when having to confront housemates about their
part in the chores
Problem Statement
When people live with other roommates, they encounter a variety of issues regarding chore distribution and bill splitting.
Jordan is frustrated by the lack of structure balancing working and improving timeliness.
How might we help her keep track of and communicate about the apartment chores and bills without the need for awkward confrontations?
Ideate
The next step was to ideate designs to solve the problems. In order to run a design studio to originate design solutions as a group, we first had to prioritize what features we need to focus on. However, as you can see in the matrix, many features ended up in the “Must have” area.
We decided to focus on the following key pages
- Home — let users see their upcome chores and bills
- Calendar — allow users to see their weekly/monthly view of upcoming shore and bills for scheduling purpose
- House Rating — Gives a user motivation to do chores in a timely manner
- Add a chore/Add a bill — Enable user to choose how to assign chores in a variety of ways, such as individual roommates, all, customer pick, random, or a game
- Game — Give a user and his/her room-mates a fun way of deciding who does chores
Mid-fi Wireframes
Here are some examples of our Mid-fi designs after polishing our rough first low-fi designs from design studio exercise.
Mid-fi Prototype User Testing
With our mid-fi wireframes, we created a prototype to conduct user testing to see if our design works for users. I personally think Mid-fi Prototype user testing is the most crucial process in ideation. This is because it always gives us a fresh perspective on our product. When in the middle of creating a product, you tend to think the product you are working on is the best. But this is not often true.
As you can see in the table below, the user testing results were semi-successful. However, there were still design challenges that we still had to implement in hi-fi wireframes and a prototype.
Hi-Fi Wireframes
In our hi-fi wireframes and prototype, we needed to implement 5 things to provide a better user experience.
- Make “+” button a noticeable color
- Add a heading above categories for Chores/Bills page
- Indicate in calendar page whose chore is listed
- Remove “My Profile” from the bottom navigation
- Simplify “Add Chore/Bill” page to avoid overwhelming users
Especially for the fifth one, simplify the “Add Chore/Bill” page, we decided to break this page into 2 pages. Instead of listing all information on one page, this way, users do not have to be overwhelmed by how much information they are looking at.
Prototype
With all implementation after the mid-fi user testing, we developed our final Hi-fi prototype.
Then, we conducted Hi-fi User testing to assess if our implementation worked or not. As showing in the table below, the testing results were improved, as well as the overall scores.
Next Step
Although the last user testing was quite successful, there is some area that we can explore to keep enhancing this app. We would like to focus below as our next steps.
- Consider updating color palette by conducting a trend/market research
- Address “House” and “Home” label similarity in the bottom navigation bar
- Design and test more types of games
- Hire a developer to consult on building the app
