With the same interview questionnaire from project 1a, I need to interview more people to get better insights into the problem.
So I interviewed two of my friends over the weekend, and continue to interview five of my classmates while on campus.
I discovered that most people have experience living in a shared house, and they are willing to share their stories during the interview. All the interviews went really well, I enjoyed the process very much.
Due to the fact that I also have some experience of living in a shared house, I tried not to put in my assumptions and lead the interviewees to give me the answer I want.
Time to make sense of all the data
I recorded all my interviews on the phone, and listened to the records many times, just to make sure I didn’t miss any details.
I wrote down all the insights on the post-it notes, with different colour notes representing different interviewees.
Next step would be making an affinity map with these notes.
The only spot that allows me to stick all these notes on is the door of my laundry room at home, it turns out to be the perfect size whiteboard for this project.
I tried my best to group them into relevant themes, but not too sure about the initial grouping. So I asked my wife to be my second pair of eyes, and she got some really good insights and suggestions!
We broke all the insights into 6 themes, and 3 themes really caught my attention which were Communications, Fear and Belief. My thought was that even though the frustrations were one of the prominent themes, the majority of pain points are shared area conflicts seemingly caused by communication issues and personal fear.
I felt like the belief theme is also worth exploring, as a number of people mentioning mutual respect is important to maintain harmony when living with other people.
The key insights I got are follow:
Do not like direct confrontations
Casual chat
Reasonable request
Mutual respect
After I obtained these insights, it actually raised more questions which I would like to ask my interviewee again.
One example would be why they are still having problems with direct confrontations if they are still feeling comfortable to remind their housemate through casual chat.
But with time constraint, I decided to go on with what I got.
Based on the key insights I got so far, I then proceed on developing a persona by using an empathy map.
Ruby is the only persona I have developed, she is a university student who shares a house with other people.
Most of the time she enjoys living with her housemate, but occasionally a housemate would cause an issue and not be aware of that.
The main problem statement I got from the persona was as follow:
Ruby needed a better way to remind her housemates regarding a conflict because she does not like direct confrontations and wanted to maintain harmony.
From the problem statement, it is clear that Ruby needs to solve a conflict and not damage her relationship with her housemates. So I came up with the HMW statement as follow:
How might we ensure that Ruby can remind her housemates regarding a conflict without direct confrontations?
How might we ensure that Ruby can solve a conflict with her housemate and maintain good relationships?
With HMW statements in hand, I went on to the ideation phrase and tried to think of a solution.
Brainstorming for ideas
While I were looking at the first HMW statement, I thought of a numbers of possible way that Ruby could avoid direct confrontations, that include:
Remind her housemate with a note
Pointing out an issue anonymously
And to maintain good relationship with housemates as state in the second HMW statement, I thought Ruby could do the following:
Make sure her housemates are not feeling offended while being reminded
Not targeting anyone while raising the issue
Express gratitude to housemates who are willing to resolve a conflict
With all the potential solutions above, I narrow my idea to a very simple messaging app that allows Ruby to post a reminder to inform her housemates regarding a conflict anonymously.
All her housemates will be notified, and if anyone is responsible for the issue, whether they are aware of it or not, will have a chance to resolve the issue.
Once the issue has been resolved, Ruby can acknowledge her housemate’s effort with some kind of simple response.
So these were the initial solutions got, and I went on to work on the first design.
I started making a few rough sketches on paper, mostly focusing on the dashboard or reminder board of the app.
I keep reminding myself what Ruby would think if she used the app for the first time, what feature would she need the most to solve her problem.
The dashboard screen should mainly facilitate reminder notes, with the latest reminder notes being shown on the top section. Other users are able to react to the reminder by putting simple icons next to the notes, the idea was to make the whole response mechanic as simple as possible to avoid misunderstanding and confrontations.
The user flow are quite straight forward as shown below:
To demonstrate the use case more clearly, I decided to make a storyboard. The scenario in the storyboard was that Ruby encountered an issue caused by her housemate, in this case the coffee machine in the shared area is not being cleaned up. She then posted an anonymous reminder in the app, and all her housemates got notified regarding the issue.
The person who is responsible can resolve the issue by cleaning up the coffee machine, and Ruby can acknowledge this by putting up a ‘resolved and thanks’ icon to the note. No one would be targeted in this process and hopefully it will help to maintain their relationship.
I did more sketches to get a better idea of how the layout and design elements would come into place in the app.
What next?
Due to the limited time frame for project 1b, I haven’t gone beyond the wireframe phrase and was not able to conduct an usability testing.
I hope I can revisit this project again in the future and keep developing the prototype, perhaps doing more in depth research and iterating the design again.
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