UX/UI Case Study | Happyco
By: Tanit Parada Tur
Tags: Design, UX, Bootcamp, User Experience, Uxer School

Introduction

Like most of my friends, I’ve spent the majority of my adult life living with flatmates. With the exception of the last couple of years, where I had my own apartment in Brussels, I’ve always had to share the space I lived in. Of course, that can be a lot of fun (and indeed I’ve made friends for life this way) but it can come with its own set of inconveniences. Having to deal with dirty dishes, noises at night and unwanted guests, sharing a flat can be frustrating.

At the beginning of the year, I traveled to Barcelona to enroll in a two-month Bootcamp on UX/UI design at UXER School. We wanted to work on the problems that arise when you live with other people, a topic we could easily relate to.

The timescale for this project was 8 weeks and was undertaken with one other student: Makena Haydon. You can read her version of this project here.

UX Design Process

Research

The challenge

The idea was to design a digital product that would allow our team of two to put in practice all that we’ve been learning during UXER School’s Bootcamp.

We decided to focus on the experience of sharing the space you live in and the issues that go with it.

Hypothesis

Once the preliminary research phase was over, we started formulating our hypothesis — the assumptions that we thought users would feel towards cleaning and organizing.

Cleaning is an issue when you share an apartment with others. You often have to clean after your flatmates.

We also thought that sharing an apartment came with other problems, like some people having to pay more than others. For example, having to put money upfront to pay for common expenses and not being paid back.

Competitive Analysis

In 2016, almost half of Spaniards between 30 and 50 years old were sharing an apartment.

However, we found a relatively small number of apps that were targeted specifically at flatmates with the aim of organizing tasks. Of those, some presented design challenges, as noted by some users in the Apple Store. For example, an overly complicated design was a common complaint in some of the apps we analyzed. Users found it difficult to use some of these apps to organize chores.

Makena and I at work.

It was here that we saw an opportunity: to create an app where you could easily create tasks, assign them to someone and making the completion process straight-forward.

Surveys and User Interviews

The purpose was to determine the basic ‘pain-points’ of flatmates when it comes to sharing the space they live in.

We prepared a survey using Survey Monkey and distributed it among multiple Facebook groups and people we knew who were sharing their apartment and lived with flatmates. We looked specifically for people that had been sharing for a year or more and had between 18 and 35 years old. We gathered information from almost 80 people.

In the last two weeks, most people had had to clean after others 2–3 times.

Almost 70% of respondents said that they lived with other people to save money

Something that we found surprising was that money was not that much of an issue as we thought it’d be. However, it became clear that different expectations towards cleaning was the number one frustration of sharing an apartment with others.

All of our respondents said they were not using a “formal” method to organize cleaning their flat or house. Some people remembered sticking a paper on the fridge hoping that’d work, but laughing at their naiviteé. People easily forget what they have to do.

Almost 75% of respondents said a lack of cleanliness is their biggest frustration when living with others

Here are some of the things people told us:

“When responsible people live together, it works, when there is a free rider, it does not.”

“When you’re not friends with the person you live with, it may be harder to say certain things to their face.”

“It’s easier to say things using your phone than in person”

“When you live with people who are not friends, communication can be more difficult and uncomfortable because there is no trust.”

“An organized system works better because you have to forget to propose it or someone to take the initiative.”

Something that stood up to us that we hadn’t considered initially is how uncomfortable talking about chores and responsibilities can be with your flatmates, especially if there’s no previous relationship. Many of our respondents used their phone to communicate because saying things to their face was simply too awkward. We were also surprised with the fact that, while people seemed to have various ways for managing their common finances (ranging from pen and paper to an app or Excel), the system worked and it wasn’t a real problem.

User Persona

As Karen Bhela points out, the user persona is a helpful tool throughout the design process because it bridges the gap between research and planning.

Meet Luis: He shares a flat in the Eixample in Barcelona and unfortunately for him, he often needs to clean his flatmates’ dishes so that he can cook his meal for the following day.

Meet Luis, our User Persona. Work by Makena Haydon

He’s frustrated but doesn’t know what to do about it: the idea of confronting his flatmates is too uncomfortable.

Planning

Empathy Map

An empathy map is a tool that allows you to visualize in depth the emotional and rational aspects of a user, in our case Luis, by asking about his actions and feelings. With this technique, we wanted to understand his point of view regarding the cleaning problem in his flat. To do that, we had to get into his skin and investigate more about his response to a particular situation.

Empathy map: what does Luis feel and think, see, say, do and listen to?

Journey Map

Customer journey maps are much like personas but they focus more on tasks and questions. Because journey maps express the user’s experience over time, we divided our map into five sections: at home, before work, on his way to work, during work, and after work (at home).

Customer Journey Map

As Paul Boag points out, the Journey Map puts on paper the development of our user’s journey through the representation of the points of contact that characterize their interaction with our product. With this, we obtain a route that helps us to reflect and to detect possible problems or improvements. For example, Luis had a negative experience before heading to work if one of his flatmates was using the bathroom at the time when he needed it.

Value Proposition Canvas

The Value Proposition Canvas is a tool which can help ensure that a product or service is positioned around what the customer values and needs. It’s formed around two building blocks — customer profile (right) and a company’s value proposition (left).

The Value Proposition Canvas by Strategyzer

We used the Value Proposition Canvas to help us decide what is most important by evaluating which steps have the most benefit for the user, and prioritize what should be built next. Because we were only two people in the team, it was especially important that we were able to establish what was most important for our customer. In other words, we had to make a choice about where to put our efforts in. In the end, we decided that the ability to create and assign tasks as well as a chat for communicating was our key priority.