Homiies App
The Problem
Living with roommates is not always easy. The Homiies app aims to help users avoid miscommunicated expectations with their roommates, balance household responsibilities, and keep track of who is doing what.
Our Goal
For this project, my team set out to design, develop, and thoroughly test a highly functional prototype of the Homiies app. We developed many iterations of our wireframes, testing each thoroughly with our target users.
Our Process
Our process focused heavily on Empathy and Competitive Research. We used user personas, competitive analysis, and user surveys to gain insights that informed the design of our app.
During our ideation stage, each member of our team produced several design sketches and wireframes to brainstorm what our app could look like. We used those designs to develop a Low Fidelity Prototype, which was tested in our first round of usability testing. This testing allowed us to make data-driven design revisions, and made us realize we needed to conduct additional research to refine our problem statement and prototype.
We then moved on to design 3 more iterations of our prototype, following the same cycle of making design updates, conducting user testing, and analyzing the data to make informed design decisions.
Understanding the Problem
In order to understand our target demographic and develop our app, we conducted preliminary user interviews. We asked the following questions:
Do you have a good relationship with your roommates?
What problems or challenges do you face living with roommates?
How do you currently manage your household responsibilities?
What is something you wish you had to help you manage your household responsibilities?
From these questions, we gathered insights that proved the problem between roommates to be a lack of reliability, trust, and communication.
“I ask roommates to do something, but they won’t do it right away.”
“It feels like it’s rude when someone asks someone to do something.”
“I do everything because I don’t trust my roommates to do it.”
We also sent out a comprehensive online survey to gain insights on living with roommates. This survey got 44 responses from students ranging from 18 – 23 years old. Some highlights from the survey include:
31 out of 44 respondents had no roommate agreement.
Most respondents did not have a system for managing chores and responsibilities
35 respondents thought household chores should be done mutually with their roommates
36 participants preferred conflicts be confronted in-person, rather than over text
Problem Interviews
After our low fidelity prototype, we realized that we needed a deeper understanding of our users’ needs before making our next design iterations. To do so, we conducted Problem Interviews. Using open-ended questions such as “Tell me about a time when…” we got users to share their experiences with roommates, and were able to identify where their conflicts were coming from.
From this, we identified three pain points:
1. Time Consuming & Stressful
Roommates had a difficult time managing daily housekeeping tasks and found miscommunications stressful:
“I’m already stressed about school and then coming home would be stressful because of all these issues with my roommates.”
“Whenever I was in the apartment our problems were front and center.”
2. Imbalance of Responsibilities
Users would not do a chore unless it was absolutely necessary and they avoided confrontation with their roommates.
“Tasks are put off until someone feels like it HAS to get done.”
“When someone finally does a task, they become passive aggressive because they feel like they take on most of the responsibility.”
3. Miscommunicated Expectations
Roommates did not effectively communicate who is responsible for what chores, especially when traveling.
“One week when I was away from the house, the trash was not taken care of and the groceries were all used up. I came back to an empty fridge and lots of trash.”
Understanding the Audience
As part of our user research and understanding the problem, we also took time to understand our audience by developing personas and journey maps. The personas helped establish the tone and hone the target user’s use case, including their personality, thought process, and preferences.
In this persona, Hannah Reilly typically takes on most of the household responsibilities in her shared apartment. Hannah feels like she is pulling most of the weight and she feels bad when she must repeatedly remind her roommates about certain tasks and duties.
Competitive Analysis
In order to ensure our design was unique, and better than our competitors, we conducted a Competitive Task-Flow Analyses of similar apps. During this phase of our research, I analyzed Homey. Below is an overview of the Task Flow Analysis:
User Flows
Next in our research, we developed User Task Flows to outline the steps users would take to accomplish a specific goal. These informed how we would approach the sequence of screens when brainstorming the design of the interface. This is the user flow I created to analyze the steps users would take to request help on a task they could not complete, as well as accepting or declining other requests.
Defining the Solution
After conducting problem interviews, we were able to refine our pain points and connect them to a corresponding feature.
Lack of appreciation →
reacting to recent activity
Balance of responsibilities →
visualize the distribution of workMiscommunicated expectations →
setting tasks & user friendly notifications
Wireframes
At this point in the process, each member of our team produced several wireframe sketches to brainstorm ideas. We each uploaded our sketches onto our collaborative Figma file and talked through our design ideas. From these sketches, we worked collaboratively to develop our Low-Fidelity Prototype.
Low Fidelity Prototype
Usability Testing – Round 1
Once our Low-Fidelity Prototype was finalized, we conducted usability testing to get feedback from our users. We used Figma to simulate interactions and note how users assumed they should complete certain tasks.
From this, we gained useful insights. For example, our users found the content organization of our home page and task page overwhelming. Users were also confused by the naming conventions of our pagess. For instance, we had a page called “Tasks” and another page called “To Do,” and it was unclear how these pages were different.
Additionally, users did not feel comfortable with of our nudge feature, saying it seemed passive aggressive. They were also were concerned by the “decline task” button, saying, “What if my roommate decides to decline tasks on a consistent basis?” Some icons were also unclear, like our Menu and To Do Icons.
Mid Fidelity Prototype
Based on our usability testing and problem interviews, for our Mid fidelity Prototype we narrowed our scope to meet the three pain points that we identified:
Miscommunicated Expectations
Balancing Household Responsibilities
Expressing Appreciation
We decided to remove less useful features, such as the breakdown of monthly rent and expenses, since they were not as relevant to the core problems we were seeking to solve.
Usability Testing – Round 2
After our second round of usability tests, we received more positive responses from users. Our notification system helped users be aware of recent activity. Users engaged with our insights page which displayed the distribution of tasks and liked the idea of seeing exactly how their roommates are contributing.
We did run into a few more problems, and were able to identify the following reasons why users were struggling with the user experience:
Unclear use of icons and buttons
Users were unable to comment or react to recent activity
Unintuitive Task Flow: 4 different navigation points (circled in red) –
Users struggled to know what to do, and where and when to navigate.Confusion on roommate agreement –
Its purpose was unclear and functionality was flawed.We were trying to do too much. Our app was cluttered by so many ideas, many of which did not solve our three pain points.
Developing a Cohesive
Style Guide
While we had our font and color scheme established for our Mid-Fidelity Prototype, we were lacking a style guide to help keep our design language consistent throughout the app. Before moving to our High-Fidelity Prototype, we took the time to develop one.
Design Decisions to Accomplish our 3 Goals
1. Appreciation
Our first pain point focuses on users feeling unappreciated by their roommates. According to our problem interviews, some users were not aware that their roommate did a chore. This would lead to passive aggressiveness between roommates: “My roommate will say, ‘I did trash, by the way,’ like they’re looking for a gold medal.”
As a design solution, we added a Recent Activities section. This keeps users aware of what their roommates accomplish each day, and gives them the opportunity to react to an accomplishment to say “thank you.”
3. Miscommunicated Expectations:
Our final pain point is Miscommunicated Expectations. Many users reported feelings of hostility between roommates because they are not clearly communicating their needs and expectations of each other.
This made us prioritize the clarity of our Create a Task Page, which features details such as who is assigned the task, when the task is due, what the task is, and how often it should reoccur.
2. Balance of Responsibilities:
In our user research, we learned that sometimes a roommate is taking on more work than others and feels like they are being taken advantage of.
As a solution, we added a chart that displays the Effort Distribution between roommates. The first is a pie chart that displays the percentage of work each roommate is completing. This is based upon the number of tasks completed, and weighted by the Effort Level of each task, which can be set upon the creation of the task.
Other Solutions
1. Revised navigation structure
The main functionality of Homiies is magagement of tasks, so in our final version we limited our app to two navigation points.
We de-cluttered the top navigation by limiting it to profile and settings, and created an Add Task button that remains in the bottom-right corner on all of our main screens.
We also limited our main screens to three: Recent Activity, Tasks that need to be completed, and Insights, which displays the effort distribution of tasks.
2. Improved Content Strategy
On the “recent” tab, users can easily react and comment on tasks that were completed by other roommates. This is now default to the home page to emphasize the engagement and appreciation for what other roommates have done.
In our second round of User Testing, we noticed that users wanted to view their tasks separately from everyone’s tasks. As a solution, we decided to add a toggle that allows the user to switch between viewing their task and all tasks.
We also clarified the reassign and request feature by changing it to “up for grabs,” with the ability to edit a due date for a task if it cannot be completed. This would limit users declining to complete a task, and make the app more flexible to users every day lives.
The Results
Usability Testing – Round 3
5/5 users immediately understood “recent” activity and could express their appreciation and thank each other. By seeing the “recent” activity the users knew exactly where they would want to go to next.
Creating a task was simple and intuitive. Users immediately knew how to get from Screen A to Screen B.
Reassign Icon of the three dots by each task were easy to navigate to.
Notes for improvement
In the “insights” page, although users understood the breakdown of tasks among users, they did not understand the difference between the two charts.
Users were not inclined to use the requests feature. Requests and Reassign seemed to cross over functionally and users would prefer to “edit” a task.
Conclusion
What did we learn?
Through the 6 months of this project, the biggest thing we learned was the importance of a design founded in research. When we started this project, we had dozens of ideas for the app and wanted to include all of them. We were all partial to our own ideas, and could not decide what to prioritize. This is what triggered us to conduct more comprehensive problem research and determine our three main Pain Points.
Once we had a clear view of what was most important to our users, we were able to prioritize certain features of our app and de-clutter. Compromises between our team members were easier to reach because our design decisions were founded in User Research rather than personal preference and assumptions.
What would we do next?
The Homiies Project was limited to a 6 month time frame. This forced us to limit the scope of our project, and focus heavily on research and prototype development. If we had more time, we would love to implement the following features:
Roommate Agreements part of our Onboarding Process:
One idea we decided to drop in our Final Prototype was the Roommate Agreement. If we had more time, this has the potential to be an effective feature that guides users through a conversation about task distribution, boundaries, and their expectations of each other.Distribution of Effort:
We want to display a dynamic visualization of the distribution of effort and number of tasks completed.Emoji Reactions:
We would like to build out the microinteraction of reacting to Recent Tasks with Emojis.
We would also be interested in taking this app into development, and begin to shift our focus to more microinteractions, animations, and other functional details that would make the User Experience of Homiies as fun and engaging as possible.