Run My Home | Mobile Application Design for Roommate Management Systems
This mobile application design project is part of the UX Design Course at Indiana University – IUPUI
Team: 2 members – I lead the project
Below, I describe my contribution to this project
Background
1. Managing household chores get challenging among roommates, especially during school life.
2. Roommates mostly share household activities like cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, and paying bills among themselves on a weekly or monthly basis.
3. They tend to manage these schedules manually using paper which is usually mounted on the refrigerator. This proves to be difficult to keep track of, especially when they are away from home.
4. Also, maintaining healthy friendship and cooperation among roommates is a critical factor – especially on tight schedules and coping up with different styles of living.
The Problem
How can I help roommates split household chores amongst themselves, manage and keep track of them in a hassle-free way?
My Rationale
Having been a student and living in shared apartments, I myself experienced with this problem every day.
Hence, I believed that we could understand and research the users’ needs closely, empathize with them and come up with the best possible solution.
My Design Process and User Research
Initial User Research
I first conducted screener surveys to reach out to our target audience and learn about their experiences of being roommates and dividing household chores.
Based on the survey results, I conducted contextual interviews to know more about the pain-points faced by our target audience.
Paper Prototyping
Testing with paper prototypes gave me a definite direction for the next phase of low fidelity prototypes on the user’s on-boarding process
It mainly helped me define an appropriate user flow of the application
It also gave an idea of the features that were more important to the users
Low Fidelity Prototyping
Implementation of the on-boarding process learned from the initial testing phase
During the Second Testing Phase, users were unable to understand the icons used for the ‘swap’ and ‘postpone task’ functionalities here
Users were unable to understand the ‘Scan’ feature which would help them automatically find out what is there in their refrigerator. This would help them know what items they must buy.
High-Fidelity Prototypes
Feedback from Users
” I loved the concept of AR grocery list. It would be fun to scan items inside the refrigerator which would detect items that are almost over and need to be bought and automatically add to the list “
“I would definitely like to try splitting up chores between my roommates and managing them using RunMyHome. It would save my efforts to constantly keep a check on the tasks manually”
” Leaderboard is a good concept to keep a person motivated “
” I would like to have a way wherein I can split the bill amount for a particular grocery list “
” I wouldn’t require a separate messaging feature “