Propel Roommates, Sprint 02: Prototyping
By: Haley Lee
Tags: Prototyping, Figma, Wireframes, Roommates, App Development

After our first sprint for user research, we began the ideation and prototyping phases. The goal was to create a product that addressed the biggest pain points that our user research revealed. Thus, we wanted to design solutions for the following problem space:

College housemates/roommates struggle to manage and organize shared spaces, primarily due to different cleanliness standards/lifestyles and a lack of communication, established systems, and accountability. Creating a system that everyone agrees on can be difficult (chores, COVID, prorating). When housemates do set initial agreements (chores, COVID, etc.), the system often fizzles out over time or only some stick to them. Current solutions are not centralized (venmo, splitwise, spreadsheets, text, etc).

01 — Product Requirements

We began by outlining our user experience priorities based upon our research. First, it was important that every house and every user is granted flexibility. Next, to simplify the experience for users, the product should have lots of automated suggestions or templates for different items such as prorating, sample chores, etc. We also needed to ensure that the app balanced accountability and negativity by facilitating proactive communication and utilizing positive reinforcement and feedback. Lastly, the biggest priority was to determine how to keep the user engaged and actually using the app.

With the amount of time we had left before demo day, we also needed to prioritize some aspects of the design over others. We decided to prioritize depth over breadth, due to one of the problems being that existing solutions are not centralized. Thus, we first created wireframes for each feature, before creating the high fidelity designs, one feature at a time.

There are five key features of Roommates:

Onboarding — The onboarding page is designed to create a positive space where everyone can feel comfortable expressing their expectations and preferences before moving in. This page includes an individualized, anonymous survey that gauges the standards of cleanliness, communication styles, financial situations, and even COVID safety guidelines from every housemate. A summary of the results are used to curate a suggested house rules list on prorating rooms, sample chore charts, guest rules, and handling conflicts. Home — The home page is split into a personal space and a shared space. On the personal space, you can see if you’ve been staying on track with completing house chores and paying expenses. You can also see how you rank on these accounts compared to your housemates; however, everyone’s rank is secret to only themselves, in order to avoid competition and potential conflict. Each housemate sees the same shared space page. This page contains the house rules and progress trackers on how clean each living space is. It also has a shared bulletin board where everyone can see notifications, reminders, and comments intended for the whole house. Expenses — The expenses page allows you to see all of the shared expenses. When your roommates owe you money, you can see who has paid and who has not. When you’re sending money to someone else, you can only see the number of people who have paid. Shopping — The shopping page is a standard, editable grocery list. However, you can add your name to items that you want to buy with other roommates so that you can see what items are shared (and therefore costs to be split). You can also see a summary of items that each person needs to pay for, if you decided to view the shopping lists by person. Chores — The chores page is designed so that when you first join the app, you must make a chores chart. First, you select the different chores that you want to include, with the option to write in your own. Then, you assign days and frequencies to each chore. Finally, you designate the chores to different people, with the option to randomize the people every week so that nobody ends up with the same chore over and over. To address the accountability issues, we designed an anonymous pinging system. If you notice a chore is overdue, you can ping the entire house saying that someone has not completed that chore. If you are having a busy day and cannot get to your chore that day, you can also send out a warning notification to everyone so that they are aware the chore will be delayed. Lastly, if you recognize that someone has done a great job of cleaning, you can award them sparkles for their good work.

02 — Information Architecture

After determining the features we wanted to include in our app, we then constructed an information architecture to map out the user flow in the app:

03 — Wireframing and Prototyping

With the contents of each screen planned out, we then began to create wireframes for each screen. We did this both on Figma and on paper. These wireframes contained only the basic functions of each feature and lacked details about the actual design or theme of our product. However, planning the essentials of each page in our wireframes facilitated the prototyping of the product.

We created the first prototype of Roommates on Figma, where we could work collaboratively. We decided to make the theme a yellow color to promote both happiness and positivity throughout the app. Because of the wireframes, we were able to work diligently, one feature at a time, making small adjustments throughout to maintain consistency in the design. Lastly, we connected all the frames together in order to allow navigation through the app for our demonstration.

04 — Takeaways

Understandably, the first iteration of our design has much to be improved upon. We did not allot ourselves enough time to both finish prototyping and begin user testing, and so a lot of our design was rushed. From this, however, we learned the importance of user testing, because there are many flaws that need to be fixed within our design, even though we had walked through it and fleshed it out in the ideation phase.

During this sprint, we created a solid foundation for future development — although our design is not perfect, our understanding of the problem space allowed us to create features we are proud of. We know that with more time, user research, and user testing, Roommates can truly make everyone’s home feel like home.