HouseKeeper

2019

For my module Human-Computer Interaction, my group was given the task of creating and designing an application. We were free to decide on whatever topic we desired, so we decided to focus on accommodation as our chosen topic. Our goal was to make sharing a house with others an easy and enjoyable experience. After brainstorming with our original theme, we narrowed down an app idea that allowed people living together to organise house duties and handle bills in one place. We concluded from interviews with testers, mainly students but also those living at home and one or two working professionals, that sharing a house was not easy and demanded cooperation and organisation. We worked on features that would facilitate housemates to live in contentment, particularly those with differing schedules. The outcome led to requirements that would assist in assigning chores, planning bills and upcoming payments and keeping others in the home updated on events or changes around the home

Research

First step involved examining the problem space, finding our potential requirements and our stakeholders

Problem Space Points

Disorganisation in the household leads to feuds and disagreements
Inability to make decisions as a group.
There can be a lack of communication.
Lack of privacy/personal space in the household.

Running a house is expensive and sometimes difficult

Overview of Potential Requirements

To provide an easier way to keep track of when bills are due
To create a much easier communication system between all the housemates, landlords etc

This system includes a way:

To create a communal bullet-in board homepage for housemates to leave general messages for the whole house
To provide an easier way of communication between the landlord and all the housemates
To share issues/problems visually and easily by being able to take and share pictures
To have reminders for general housing schedules such as bins & recycling
To simplify delegating housework between housemates
To supply local information related to house repairs and general upkeep

User Types Stakeholders

Tenants - These are the target users for our potential application.

Developments - They will work on the upkeep of the applications

Landlord - Landlord can input the application to communicate with tenants if needed

Service Workers - We intend that workers such as plumbers and electricians would be connected with the application by the landlord

Parents - This can also be used in a family setting

Student - Most likely our main users of the application

Secondary Research involved looking at what was already available and could be considered helpful for our stakeholders.

Understanding Users & Design Requirements

After conducting our secondary research, we moved onto the interview stage of our design. Our main findings we found include:

Understanding the User

The majority live in college accommodation
Mostly living with friends
Communication is relatively okay.

Challenging Assumptions

Generally enjoy living with others
Communicating delegation of work can be difficult
The mentality that each person believes they’re right about issues.

Behaviour

Difficulty solving simple issues because of social reasons
No one wants the “parent” title
Theirs unspoken atmosphere when conflict
Conflict is generally avoided

Interest

General interest in the app.
Uncertainty whether people would bother using it.
Interest would be gained if there was a way to get everyone to cooperate.
More interest from people living in student accommodation than at home.

As our application is targeted towards people living in rental accommodation we wanted to make our users as versatile as possible when creating personas. We then used these personas to aid us to learn more about our stakeholders moving forward.

To conclude this stage, we created storyboards to illustrate scenarios when the app could potentially be used.

Design Requirements to Paper Prototyping

The most important thing for us moving forward when designing our app is not to lose focus of the main functionality. Behind all the bells and whistles we want to design an app that can fulfill the users needs and provide a good user experience. To achieve this we narrowed down the main elements of what we want the app to achieve into different headings.

Core Functionality

Chores - to delegate work among housemates
Events - to organise plans among the house easily
Payment - to simplify paying rent + all house utilities
Home Screen - where recent and important information can be quickly read
General - Such as reminders, notifications etc

Secondary Functionality

Login and Register - to create an account or signing into the app. This may be done through Google and Facebook also.
Settings - logging out and changing users settings.

Next step involved sketching ideas on how we would like our features to be displayed.

After comparing ideas, we came up with the final low fidelity wireframe. This adapted all our ideas as a group. We also decided to name the app HouseKeeper.

High Fidelity Prototype

Finally, we were able to move onto the final step of our project and that was to create our high fidelity prototype. We created and designed this prototype through Figma where a clickable prototype is avaliable.

The image below links to the clickable prototype: