Intuit Design Challenge 2016

Date: 2/1/2017 (Revised)

RunMyHome

Team Members Pinaj Basutkar Tejas Bhalerao

Table of Contents

The Mission Design Process

Stage One: Gotta catch all the User’s ‘Pain-Points’ Natural Observation Brief Interviews

Stage Two: Hack into Users minds to know their Needs Contextual Inquiry

Stage Three: Let the wound be seen. Let the problem be defined. The Problem: The scheduling of household chores among the housemates and thereafter maintaining their progress status is a time consuming and tedious task.

Stage Four: Eureka! Design Workflow Diagram Interface Structure Diagram Sketches/Wireframes

We are extremely excited to showcase the revised version of our project for the Intuit Design Challenge 2016! We call our idea ‘ RunMyHome’.

The Mission

Create an experience that solves the household tasks management problem.

Design Process Why are we creating and following a Design framework? Because we want to win the game. Yes, processes win games, and they do it by increasing the certainty of accomplishing the final goal. A better analogy for not having a process could be riding a roller coaster without any underlying track. Would you want to risk your chances (of survival)? No. So, we brainstormed on how to brainstorm for this specific problem context and created and iterated our Design process. Illustrated below is our story about tackling the design challenge and trusting our process to yield the desired solution. It’s important to note here that we’ve described the entire process from problem identification to execution. So at this point the title of the story (the shortlisted problem) is yet to be identified. Let the challenge begin! Audience : Graduate and Undergraduate students at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC); Interns around the bay area and Rhode Island; Ourselves. We chose our audience (would-be users) to be university students as we could empathize closely with them and their problems. Scale, market potential and high user acquisition rate (personal contacts) were the other reasons to target this population.

Stage One: Gotta catch all the User’s ‘Pain-Points’

Goal: Learning about the problems people around us are facing with respect to managing their daily tasks. Expected Outcome : List of problems and the emotional impact associated with them. Techniques:

Natural Observation

As opposed to the Controlled Observation Technique which might beget the Hawthorne Effect and not yield objective results, we decided to observe the people doing their tasks in an uncontrolled natural environment. The focus was to learn what routine tasks do the users perform and how do they do them. Along with these points, we also recorded emotional

reactions while performing these tasks. It helped us identify the pain points and also uncover moments of delight.

Results: Being UX enthusiasts, we had already been keeping keen eyes on the problems we face daily. We had an understanding of few the major quotidian problems and increasing the user base just helped us to reinforce our hypothesis. We then included the interns who stay in shared housing around us. We found few very interesting results:

● People find it frustrating and time consuming to manage household chores among roommates like dishwashing, cooking, trash removal and lawn mowing in shared apartments. Sometimes they even forget important tasks like Rent payment and Bill payments. Few of them do the scheduling on paper by creating a table and assigning weekly activities to house members. However, in this case, change in house member’s routine requires change in the task management sheet, which eventually forces them to recreate the sheet after some days. Few have hacked this problem by creating digital spreadsheets in order to minimize the time and effort required to make changes. However, updating the sheets again and again is a frustration and as a result, they eventually give up. Another problem is to ensure whether these schedules and sheets are actually followed. Many complain that even after creating schedules and assigning tasks to every member of the house, tasks are not accomplished as expected and there is no efficient way to track it. Hence, scheduling household chores seems to be a grave problem among students and young professionals staying in shared apartments.

● For accomplishing different tasks, people simply find apps through the Google Play Store or iTunes Store which are ranked best. But they soon realize they might not be the best for ‘them’. For instance, few people used Google Keep for note taking, few use Evernote and others just wrote the notes down on to the sticky notes. But these users had tried different apps until they finally settles down to one.

● We never thought changing lanes was such a big problem until we observed that ‘Everyone’ at least looks once in the side mirrors, at the back and in the blind spot to check for the possible traffic obstacle. The drivers find this extremely frustrating and a tedious job. Also, we observed that it destroys the entire seamlessness of the driving experience. However, the experience with reverse turns is a bit better as the drivers take the advantage of rear cameras.

Brief Interviews

We also proactively asked the audience to share what their routine problems and we documented them. The interviews were simply casual talks which again were conducted in an uncontrolled environment. The focus of the interviews were to reinforce what we learned from the observations and to uncover more insights which we couldn’t capture by passive observation. The average time duration per user was around 8-10 mins. We found few other interesting problems and also validated our initially found problems.

Results: ● For managing the scheduling of household tasks, many students either use note taking

apps or excel sheets or sticky notes. None of them used any task management app for automating the process. But, after starting their set schedules, most of them soon realized that the scheduling is getting difficult as someone had a break in the schedule and which accounted for rescheduling.

● Few used websites like Product Hunt to search apps that might suit them, few others clicked on Ads from google while surfing, and others followed what their friends suggested (Word of Mouth). However, even with these hacks, the problem of recommendation based on one’s personality still persisted.

● None of the drivers had any hacks for a better changing method. They relied on looking in the mirrors and looking behind the car to identify traffic obstacles. The problem persists.

● Other problems which we uncovered were about parking problems around the university area, inefficient personal expense tracking, unbreakable addiction circle for Pokemon Go, and the list continues.

A point to note here is both the above techniques weren’t implemented strictly in a sequential or separate manner, for it was actually a ‘to and fro’ process of problem identification and validation. After auditioning the set of problems which act as villains in our daily experiences, we had to select one. It was difficult. Really. We weighed the problems across the factors like severity, impact of reduction, technical & economical feasibility, scale, improvement in user experience and improvement in our Design thinking skills. The winner was the Household Chores Management Problem! Now that we identified the Antagonist in our story, we had to start working on creating the Protagonist: The Solution. The journey was getting interesting as we discovered how big the impact on the students could be. We identified the foremost task to be completed in order to solve the problem. Identify the Users and their Needs.

Stage Two: Hack into Users minds to know their Needs

Goal: Identifying the characteristics of the users and their needs. Expected Outcome : List of users characteristics and needs. Techniques:

Contextual Inquiry We interviewed 6 participants who have faced the same problem.

Demographics: Age: 22-28 years Gender breakdown: 3 Males, 3 Females Occupation: Graduate Students at RIT (2) and UMBC (2); Intern at Rhode Island (1) and in the Bay area (1) Technical Proficiency: High (Tech Savvy) We chose Contextual Inquiry as our interviewing technique as it’s semi structured nature helped us obtain qualitative and quantitative data. In the initial stage of need identification, qualitative data helped us to form hypotheses and quantitative data helped us to take immediate decisions. Described below are the important questions which we tried to answer during this stage of empathizing. What are the characteristics of the people facing this problem? The primary audience facing this problem is college students who live in shared apartments. Out of the participants interviewed, all of them stay in either shared apartments or townhouses. 6 of them have been staying away from home for more than a year. All go to schools and 4 out of 6 work on weekdays and sometimes on weekends. Thus, their daily routine keeps changing according to their school/work requirements. All share their houses with other roommates (2-5) and are mostly new to them. 2 out of 6 are introverts while other 4 are socially outgoing. 5 out of 6 believe in sharing and caring while others strictly respect their privacy. Active inclination towards carrying out household chores changes from person to person. 3 of the 6 admit that they have even forgotten to do their tasks once. Few others have purposely tried running away from doing their tasks.. Goals: Which are the few goals that users look towards achieving? Equal and timely distribution of household chores among housemates. Tasks: What are the few tasks which users perform in order to solve the problem? Divide the tasks equally among roommates and schedule them in a timely manner. Moreover, to ensure that the tasks are being undertaken as scheduled, they track the progress of scheduled tasks and mark their status. Functionality: What set of functions should the solution incorporate in order to let the users complete their tasks and accomplish their goals? The solution should allow users to set up an environment where they can add a number of tasks that are generally included in household chores. Next, divide those tasks among the members in the house and schedule them according to their frequency of occurrence. Also, the product should track progress of the scheduled tasks, remind the users and probe them to complete their tasks on time, allow easy re-scheduling of tasks if there are any changes.

Device: What device(s) would the users prefer to use the product on? All the users (6) are heavy mobile phone users who use note taking and other apps for managing their other tasks. Thus, it would be wise and beneficial to leverage this existing habit and mental model of the users to provide them a household task management mobile app. Does our target users have a strong need of this product? Let’s assume there isn’t a need for such a solution. In that case, people still will find workarounds like creating weekly task schedules either in excel sheet or on paper. Few may even form groups on Whatsapp or Facebook to remind each other of the tasks. However, based on our interviews, they have found themselves struggling with adapting to changing schedules, vulnerable to forgetting the tasks, and lastly, maintaining an inventory of different tasks from time to time. In short, assuming that there isn’t a need of a better solution is false.

Stage Three: Let the wound be seen. Let the problem be defined.

Goal: Define the problem in a generalized way which exposes the pain points Expected Outcome : The problem definition “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.” -Albert Einstein Along the lines of the aforementioned saying, we put much of our efforts to understand the problem space. By trying to find what causes discomfort to the users, we were able to tap the pain points and add more clarity to the problem’s structure.

The Problem: The scheduling of household chores among the housemates and thereafter maintaining their progress status is a time consuming and tedious task. Factors causing the problem:

● Changing routines of housemates requires constant change in the task schedule ● Tasks need to be saved and reminded of in order to prevent them from forgetting ● Housemates need to be encouraged (incentive) to take up and complete the tasks ● Failing to complete tasks on time can lead to compromise in hygiene, monetary

penalty (Lawn mowing), monetary loss (bill payment), pest infection and frustration

Stage Four: Eureka!

Goal: Brainstorm to ideate the detailed form of the solution. Expected Outcome : Solution Workflow, Sketch, Wireframe We brainstormed on the problem and focussed on the user’s needs to create the system workflow. We developed a Novel technique of task management which provides user complete freedom with task selection and is in no way affected by changing time schedules. Algorithm: Every user will be associated with a task score per task. Task score is the number of times the user has completed the task. The range of these scores for every task is 1-10. The Main Screen of the App provides the user with the list of tasks ordered by user’s score and then by Time Due. Use Case: A user will see all the tasks due on the main screen. They will be ordered by their level of required action: Immediate, Soon, Not so soon decided based on the user’s score and the total score of other members competing for the task. Using color for highlighting, we propose to help user quickly identify the task which need immediate action. Thus using Red, Yellow and Green for such tasks is a good indicator. Finally, for choosing a task for pick up, a user simply has to select the Pick up button which marks the task as complete. A notification will be sent to the members of the task and it will then be sent to archive (History). This way no one needs to worry about weekly schedules and all tasks happen in time. Shown below is the complete workflow of our solution from starting the app to closing it.

Interface Structure Diagram

High Resolution image: http://tejasbhalerao.com/home/projects/runmyhome/img/workflow.png

Personas

Sketch

High Resolution Image: http://tejasbhalerao.com/home/projects/runmyhome/

Wireframes

High Resolution Images: http://tejasbhalerao.com/home/projects/runmyhome/

Hi-Fidelity Mockups

High Resolution Images: http://tejasbhalerao.com/home/projects/runmyhome/

We appreciate your time and consideration in reviewing our design work. Thank You. Until next Design challenge. . .