project type
academic
role
UX designer
As my first project during my Integrated Product Design Masters program at UPenn, I was paired with another student to understand roommates needs and translate those needs into implications for product design. My teammate worked as the UI designer, while I contributed as the UX designer.
Through research with individuals with varying current and past roommate situations, we discovered that roommates struggle the most with initiating, executing and maintain a shared to do plan. We set off to identify and understand roommates largest pain points with to do plan’s with the goal of designing a solution that creates a clean and happy home.
We designed a digital application that solves for roommates largest pain points of contention with accountability, difficulty implementing a plan and persistent unequal distribution of chores.
Working as the UX designer, partnering with a UI designer and driving the design process, this was the approach I took.
We began by conducting user interviews to understand how people live & manage shared responsibilities together. Some interviews were in person, while others were in a virtual setting. We came back to these interviewers multiple times throughout the design process for validation and user testing.
The interviewees were particularly valuable for our use case. They had a variety of living situations over the past ten years that provided fruitful insights into shared living dynamics and how roommates execute to do’s for shared living spaces.
We wrote down verbatim what interviewers said onto virtual stickies and used Miro to begin sorting the stickies into identifiable themes. We were then able to distill our interviews to enable us to identify key pain points with shared living situations.
We then sorted our stickies into broader themes that helped us identify key pain points. Many of the themes that did come up were related to pain points that each roommate had while living with others.
Each interviewer had their own distinct opinion, but there were overlapping themes and pain points that surfaced. See graphic below for themes and pain points that we found through our research.
After identifying all the themes, a quantitative assessment was utilized to identify the top 3 pain points impacting roommates as they pertain to shared to do’s by counting the number of stickies underneath each of the key themes to highlight the most discussed topic.
I understood that a wide range of design solutions could result from the top three main pain points that were identified and that we needed to narrow our scope. With the top pain points in mind, we created a list of ‘how might we statements’ that might solve for these thematic pain points, and mapped them qualitatively on a need vs. want matrix. This helped us prioritize our design targets to ultimately land on a final how might we statement in the top right quadrant that will drive our solution development.
How might we... enable roommates to initiate, execute & maintain an equitable chores regime with equal distribution of work & a friendly method of accountability?
With a narrowed design target and an understanding of our users pain points, we then set forth to begin generating ideas to solve for these pain points.
We leveraged the crazy 8 exercise to generate ideas for potential solutions to our top pain points, and subsequently engaged in a dot voting exercise to identify our most viable solutions
We wanted to test our initial MVP with our users prior to solidifying our solution to the problem areas. While we were confident in our onboarding flow, we wanted to specifically test receptiveness to our 3 ideas for holding accountability with roommates when chores weren’t completed as expected. We used a low fidelity story boarding to accomplish this.
We wanted to specifically test how receptive our users were to our 3 different ideas for holding accountability when assigning and completing chores. From the feedback we received, we took a hybrid of each of our accountability sets.
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I wanted to test our assumption that this app will help solve roommates largest pain points pertaining to to-do’s. Through a Google Survey and acting as the app ourselves for 5 rooming situations (providing an incentive of a home cooked dinner), we gleaned new insights and were able to validate that our model of ensuring to do's are completed works at a small scale.
We tested our assumptions by mimicking the Chore Master and having our user’s houses outline their chores for the week. The results were mixed, yet promising. People did complete a high number of chores ultimately but we found out some interesting things for the future.
Beyond ensuring our to-do model worked, we also gleaned important insights that would be incorporated into the final offering:
After confirming our assumptions, we dove into low fidelity wireframing to help us begin to understand potential visuals and features
To decrease the barrier to initiating a to-do plan and to ensure roommates do the chores they like, the onboarding flow collects details about the house and roommate preferences and identifies a shared activity that drives accountability. To-do’s are automatically generated and equitably distributed based off this information and sent to the roommates for approval.
To ensure each roommate is contributing equally toward the household to-do’s, chores are automatically assigned to each roommate based on their preferences, time requirements, and appeal.
To ensure accountability across all roommates, at the end of each to-do period each roommate’s to-do’s are assessed and, if they don’t complete the required percentage of their chores, they will need to complete the pre-determined household activity that was set in the onboarding stage. In this case, the roommates need to cook dinner.
On the home page, users can view all roommate stats, providing them with the data points to initiate difficult conversations with their roommates who may be falling behind. Roommates can also track the house’s level of cleanliness and their own to-do’s.
To avoid frustration with the level of cleanliness and to ensure accountability, roommates align on to-do specifics before assignment, the details of which are placed in the chore page. Here, roommates can view the current chore owner, chore stats, and applicable instructions. They can even post photos to set expectations for completion.
At this point, I would begin socializing the app with engineers for the build of the product. Aside from the overall app design, structure, information architecture, etc. It will be critical bridge the gap between engineering and design to ensure that the findings we uncovered during user interviews and validation are incorporated into the back end logic of the app for features such as automatic chore assignment and chore preference weighting. Sadly the scope of the project for the class stopped here.
