Dust Bunny:
Conceptual Habit Building App
Kelcie Matousek- UX Research and Design
Amy Rogan- UI and Visual Design
Meredith Burton- UI Design & Competitive Research
Hadley Reetz- User Testing and FE Development
THE IMPETUS
Building "Clean" Habits
Our team had a shared experience of struggling to maintain household cleanliness, from either struggling to form the habit or due to living with roommates. Upon further analysis, we determined household chores to be a widespread challenge among adults.
Our high level goals were:
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Create an experience people would enjoy and return to in order to help them manage household tasks.
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Make cleaning tasks easier to organize and assist with tracking.
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Understand our users relationship with and knowledge of cleaning to find the best way to motivate users to return to the app and build better habits.
RESEARCH
Cleaning is for Everyone
Fully acknowledging that most people are cleaning their homes, we started the research phase with three different proto-personas with different life experiences and challenges:
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Shelby Fabuloso- A young adult living on her own with her cat Oyster. Habitually puts off cleaning because she frequently doesn’t notice it needs done until it’s out of control and she feels overwhelmed by the cleaning that needs done.
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Dawn Smith - A woman in her late-30s who desires a more equitable division of labor within her marriage.
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Eric Sparkles - A grad student living with two roommates. Eric has a Type A personality and between work and school, desires a clean space he can relax in. He’s definitely cleaner than his roommates and would like for them to do more of the cleaning but hates constantly reminding them.
RESEARCH
User Interviews
Our competitive analysis of habit forming and cleaning apps strongly influenced what kind of information we needed to discover from our user interviews. Some common traits we identified in strong competitors were: immediate rewards for completing a task, mascots that helped lead users through their journey, and the ability to redeem their points for real prizes. It was here we began to seriously discuss how we could create a gamified app experience that could simultaneously help users build better habits and make the experience fun and rewarding.
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The results of our competitive analysis encouraged us to ask our users questions about their experiences with cleaning as a kid, how they form habits on their own and the emotions surrounding that experience, and how messy spaces effect their mindset.
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Key Interview Takeaways:
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There is a direct correlation between how frequently people helped clean as children and how effective their cleaning scheduling and habits are as adults.
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100% of our user interviews expressed anxiety or unpleasant feelings when in a messy environment.
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Majority of our users shared feeling disappointed in themselves or discouraged when they fail to complete a task they are trying to habitualise.
RESEARCH
User Persona
Our user interviews revealed that there was a strong need for an app of this sort among young adults, both living on their own and those living with roommates or family.
While we wanted to develop both features for both user personas, the time span of the project required we develop an app suited for only one of our personas. After much discussion, we decided it would be most prudent to develop the app for a single user and that expansion of the project could result in a “multiplayer” feature.
This decision process led us to our user persona, Ms. Sophie Meyers, a further iteration on our proto-persona, Shelby Fabuloso.
THE PROBLEM
Users Struggle with...
We observed adults are struggling to motivate themselves to maintain a clean home and build consistent cleaning habits within their household. How might we develop a program that is habit-building, and makes cleaning more manageable and motivating for our users?
IDEATION
Feature Prioritization Matrix
Once we identified our plan of action, we all brainstormed features using “I Like, I Wish, What If,” which were then discussed, voted on, and moved into a feature prioritization matrix. Since we would be doing the front end development for the app as well, it was important to us that we had a clear understanding of the complexity of each of the features we were developing. Creating the feature matrix helped us identify our proposed products & services and subsequent pain relievers and gain creators:
Primary Features
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Cleaning Checklist
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House map with tasks broken down by room
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Celebrations for completing tasks
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Dirty Dice (game feature) and/or other games, like racing against the timer
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Cleaning Coaching (future feature)
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Study habits and motivation to customize cleaning time and tasks (future feature)
Pain Relievers
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Provide motivation to clean using mascots, streaks, and other gamification features
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Gamified features utilized to help build habits to reduce stress around cleaning
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Connect to smart appliances (i.e. Rumbas) for “passive cleaning” (future feature)
Gain Creators
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Get points, awards, and maintain a streak to build motivation and habits around cleaning
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Break down tasks by room and timeline
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Analyze daily activity to recommend best cleaning time
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Mascot to provide encouragement and cleaning lessons
PROTOTYPING
Wireframing
After storyboarding and iterating on userflows, we began the prototyping process. We were struggling to reach a consensus on how we wanted some of the gamification features to look and flow so we each sketched paper prototypes; we then gathered all the ideas together to discuss and vote on our strongest ideas.
Home screen and room addition page from Kelcie’s sketches.
Task page and badge/points page from Amy’s sketches.
Room progress icons and level up screens from Hadley’s sketches.
USER TESTING
Mid-Fi Prototype Testing
We received feedback that users thought our mascot was cute and liked him on the homescreen.
One of the biggest risks we took in our mid-fi prototype was nixing a traditional nav bar in favor of a fully navigational home screen and utilizing a play button to find games.
Users were confused by the play button with only 75% of tests completing correctly with minimal confusion- suggesting the need for a more traditional navigation bar.
We received commented that the Room icons looked like photos loading and was confusing for some users.
In several of our tests, users had some confusion surrounding the wording on the Add Room section including the Room Input and Difficulty of task.
Users commented on enjoying some of our UI elements to increase user delight- like confetti!
Users enjoyed the game and 90% mentioned they were delighted by the play on words of “Dirty Dice”
A behavior we did not predict that we had to adjust for was that people would want to roll again if they didn’t want to do the task it came up with.
We received feedback that Dirty Dice felt like an entity of it’s own and that it was a separate brand from the rest of our app, which motivated some iterations on the color and layout.
100% of users were able to locate their badges and trophy case- users liked having badges to work towards
Users liked that they could see the badges yet to earn but wanted to be able to see what they needed to do to achieve the badge.
PROTOTYPING
UI Style Tile
As we iterated on our prototype and worked on developing the hi-fi and coded version, we began finalizing our UI Style Guide. We let cleaning products be the inspiration for our stylistic design decisions; utilizing bright, energetic colors inspired by popular cleaning products, such as yellow rubber gloves, Dawn dish soap, and Tide laundry detergent. In addition soft, rounded elements and fonts were used to reinforce a playful, gaming environment.
PROTOTYPING
Hi-Fi Prototype
Taking what we learned from the mid-fi prototyping, we developed a hi-fi prototype- complete with adhering color scheme, icons, new navigation bar, and more refined graphics. For this step of the project, we focused our hi-fi version on Sophie's exploration of the app and what a solo user would do- add rooms to their household, cross off cleaning tasks, look for potential badges to earn, and play Dirty Dice when she can't figure out what to clean.
Users can enter their rooms from the home page to see room specific task.
Task lists can be organized based off user set difficulty level or alphabetically.
Confetti splashes across the screen when Sophie crosses off a task to delight and encourage her.
Users can create custom rooms and set room traffic, which will change the default frequency for tasks.
After the mid-fi testing, the task addition card now changes color once it's been selected to easily identify which ones are active.
Users receive points for adding rooms to encourage adding more chores to the tracker.
Dirty Dice can be a fun game or a tool, for anyone like our user Sophie, who struggles with executive function or beginning tasks.
Users have the ability to reroll if they don’t have the time or energy for the presented option.
The app automatically crosses off the task when the All Done button is selected.
CONCLUSION
Next Steps
Due to the time period of the project we prioritized establishing the basic interface and UI patterns of the app; with more time we'd like to expand on our original idea using the app to help share household tasks.
In addition to the first point, we'd build out a portfolio page in the app to allow users to add guests and pets.
Through our research, we found a common method of motivation was using the points to redeem for real life things- so we'd like to build out a feature that allows people to redeem points for coupons and discounts on cleaning products.
Last but not least, our user interviews showed many people do not know how to clean some things and/or that certain things even need to be cleaned (e.g. the inside of the washing machine) and so we'd like to build out a feature that offers instructional videos or step by step instructions for cleaning.