haRMony

Human-Centered Design Process - Creating a product that turns roommates into chore superheroes, by effortlessly managing tasks and maintaining harmony in shared spaces.

Project Overview

Living with roommates can be a wonderful experience, but it also comes with its fair share of challenges. One difficulty is divvying up chores and ensuring everyone does their part to maintain a clean and organized living space. haRMony was created to address this common issue faced by roommates and make the shared living experience more harmonious.

Duration: 2 week

Role: UX Designer

Project Type: Personal project - 2 week sprint

The Problem

With a shared living space, every roommate is meant to contribute their share of chores around the house, but this often isn’t the case. Dishes might be left in the sink, and dust might collecting on the floors. Moreover, without an organized way of tracking this, assigning tasks may end up unfair. haRMony aims to add efficiency and accountability into your lives without adding more hassle. 

The first step to understanding this challenge was to understand the problem space. As someone who has lived with roommates previously, I can imagine a few different issues that can easily be tackled, but I’m just one person with my own opinions. Thus, I reached out to other people who might experience the same issues, and gauged their opinions and thoughts on this problem space. With this, I tackled the question of “How might we improve the living experience for roommates?”

The Solution

Introducing haRMony - an all-in-one app dedicated to creating a harmonious living space for roommates through efficiency and accountability:

Key Features

  1. Maintaining accountability via house chores. House groups have the opportunity to add communal chores for roommates to divide up, as well as their own individual chores noted. Completing all chores completes your circle for the week, and boosts your house statistics! 

  2. Adding notes and reminders. House groups have a section for all reminders to roommates for any important events occurring (ie. going grocery shopping) and any house rules so that roommates don’t forget.

  3. Increasing ease and efficiency. This can double as a shared calendar so that scheduling any events can be worked around everyone’s schedules (this can be linked to your current calendar!).

The Research

Roommates are prevalent everywhere, so the obvious start for this project is to interview a few different people —some college students and other young adults living with their friends. Here were the results:

  1. Some people felt that the biggest pain was keeping the communal spaces clean, but wanting there to be a fair distribution (ie. everyone should clear the bathroom in rotation). 

  2. Some people felt that their roommates sometimes forgot their assigned tasks, and would leave it to others to finish up. 

  3. Some people felt that their roommates didn’t give a notice when someone was coming over, when they would like a quick heads up. Others felt awkward always reaching out and mentioning it. This led into another conversation about roommates feeling even more awkward bringing up certain things (like washing the dishes in the sink).

Overall, I noted the main pain points:

While life habits are hard to change with one app, increasing more professional communication channels might allow for better boundaries and awareness to your roommates’ needs, and vice versa. 

From here, I introduced my three personas: Arden, Isaac, and Monica.

Wireframes

Reflection

I limited myself to only two weeks for this personal project to test-work in a fast-paced environment and hone in on the key concepts for this project throughout the discovery process. Given more time, I’d like to focus on user testing the current state and focusing on any improvement points (such as exploring any other features that would be necessary and what might incentivize users to complete their chores diligently).