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iOS App that develops habits and tracks cleaning tasks with featured gamification.
How might we develop a program that is habit-building, and makes cleaning more manageable and motivating for our users? We want to first understand a user's current cleaning habits, find pain points to offer solutions to manage and maintain a clean living environment, and offer motivation to complete tasks.
We proposed three fitting personas that could be the target audience for Dust Bunny:
Shelby & Eric find it difficult to keep track of all the cleaning and maintenance that needs to occur in their living space. Having an app to keep track and remind users will make staying on top of chores easier, because a clean house reduces stress and allows people to focus better on work, family, and the other parts of life that are important to them.
Dawn would find value in a task app for reducing mental load and tension in her relationship. Dividing the labor more 50/50 helps to make their marriage feel like a more equitable partnership.
The plan is to let the research guide us to finding our user persona.
We wanted to understand the successes and areas of improvement of our direct competition of comparative task apps.
Areas of Focus:
• Gamification features
• Customization process of a user’s space
• Scheduling + organizing tasks
• Use of characters or mascots
• Coaching screens
• Rewards & Celebration haptics
Our interview plan of 15-20 questions aimed to understand people’s current cleaning practices and tracking habits. We obtained great insight on how much cleanliness effects mood, along with how their habits stem from their past.
Demographics:
• Ages 24-37
• Males + Females
• Living alone + with Partners
Our team collaborated in Figma to organize the interview results from our 6 participants. Finding and organizing similar groupings of answers to reveal common pain points or solutions in habits and behaviors surrounding household chores.
Considering research and information from interviews, we were able to narrow down a user persona to one: Ms. Sophie Meyers.
Pain Points
• Likes a clean space but hates cleaning
• Struggles to keep up with laundry - too much time to wash, dry and fold
• Cat hair is overwhelming, but hates to sweep and mop her floors
• Works full time job and doesn’t have extra time or energy for cleaning
Goals
• Most comfortable in a clean environment
• Avoid last-minute cleaning just before hosting guests
• Feel more organized and put together
Needs/Expectations
• To feel that she can relax in her space
• Needs a clean place to host friends
• Wants a cleaning schedule thats manageable and flexible
• Craves motivation to clean
Motivations
• Wishes she had a set cleaning schedule
• Wants guidance to build a schedule
• Won’t have to cancel on friends with a consistently clean place
Sophie Meyers, a time-strapped socialite, needs to work on building better cleaning habits because as a kid she didn’t have to contribute to household cleanliness and now living alone, messes and chores are out of control, and she’s struggling to maintain a clean apartment where she feels comfortable relaxing and hosting.
We observed adults are struggling to motivate themselves to maintain a clean home and build consistent cleaning habits within their household.
Breaking down the benefits and solutions our app will provide our user, Sophie Meyers.
After our team brainstormed with the “I like, I wish, what if” method, we narrowed down the best features that have the highest impact for users and easiest to execute. This is our guide to begin low fidelity sketches.
Follow Sophie Myers as she escapes living in squalor. She finds the motivation to stay on top of tasks by using the Dust Bunny app to keep up with chores. In her new clean space, she never cancels on friends to host gatherings at her place and is always prepared for impromptu visits.
We mapped two processes to anticipate a user’s journey from entry point to completion of two tasks: onboarding and a gamification feature. Dirty Dice is an interactive game that provides the user a fun way to receive a task. These blueprints give us an intuitive plan that is used to begin prototyping.
Taking into account our user flows and focusing on feature prioritization matrix items, our team worked on quick sketches to develop our app screens.
We sketched individually, then collaborated and discussed the best solutions. It helped visually organize the information and see the big picture of features.
Using wireframe sketches as a foundation, we started building prototypes for user testing.
Using our mid-fi prototype, we began testing to better understand how the user navigated our app. We conducted tests with 6 people, instructing them to perform 3 tasks.
1. Create and customize a room.
2. Locate and view your badges in your trophy case.
3. Navigate from the main menu to play Dirty Dice.
Users did not easily comprehend the form for adding rooms, many were unsure if they added a task successfully.
We need to provide better visual cues of which items were being added. We also need to further develop the “add Task” feature, because users wanted the ability to add a custom task.
Additional comments were that they did not interpret the progress bar on the room card on the home screen, they thought it was indicating something loading.
All users had a 100% success rate of finding their badges and trophy case.
We did receive feedback that they would like to know how to earn future badges of the ones that were greyed out. We will ellaborate on those in the high fidelity prototype.
Users did not quickly realize that the play button would expand to reveal more options. Even for the successful 75% of users that found the Dirty Dice game, they only realized it expanded after exploring for a while.
Our plan is to iterate by implementing a traditional and more robust navigation bar.
• Users enjoyed the interactions & user delights
• Users complimented and understood the bunny illustration, which prompted the name "Dust Bunny" for our app.
• Users had fun playing Dirty Dice and thought it was a clever name. They wanted to keep rolling again!
We chose popular cleaning items that are bright and energetic as the inspiration for Dust Bunny’s color palette. We have soft, rounded edges for the font and graphic elements, that create a playful gaming feel.
I illustrated the bunny, that we introduced in Mid-Fi Prototypes. Users understood and liked the "dust bunny" reference which motivated the name for our app.
Taking feedback from the first round of user testing and applying our styling, we moved to a hi-fi prototype.
I wanted to create an inviting and fun splash screen to grab the attention for our users. There may be a lot happening but I still kept it short to about 5 seconds.
It was also a great opportunity to introduce the dust bunny mascot. This helps explain the name with the relationship to cleaning.
Using the Hi-Fidelity Prototype, we conducted a second round of user tests. We tested 6 people again, instructing them to perform the some of the same tasks with minor edits or additions.
1. Create and customize a room.
2. After locating badges, see how you can earn future badges.
3. Navigate from the main menu to play Dirty Dice.
4. You feel like cleaning, use the app to find a task.
On the second round of testing the adding a room task, there was much improvement and comprehension.
We edited the verbiage to be more descriptive for each of the tasks. We also added color to the form when the user selected a certain task. This help the user confirm what item they were needing to adjust.
Not only was there a 100% success rate, you could see the confidence and quickness the user improved while performing this task.
Finding Badges and the trophy case was very successful first time around, but we found users wanted to click and learn how to earn future badges.
Now if you click on a greyed out icon, you can learn what the badge is and how to earn it.
Users seemed pleased with this addition.
Adding a traditional bottom Nav Bar on the home screen vastly improved the success rate of users finding the Dirty Dice game.
We also added a roll again option, which our users enjoyed.
Upon completing the task, users are able to see that the item is checked off their list and feel accomplished.
Users liked seeing "Quick Tasks" section on the home page for convenience. Most did click on Tasks in the Nav Bar to view more. They were pleased to see that you can search for tasks: easy, hard or alphabetically.
Various rooms have the same tasks, so we added a small icon that is color coded to the room sheet with a label: LR for Living Room or SR for Sophie's Room.
When we started this project, we felt there was a strong need for sharing tasks and dividing chores amongst partners or roommates. Our research took us down a path to focus on individuals organizing their chores, but we would have loved to take it further where you can add people and divide chores. Even a task, like feeding a pet, would be nice to keep track of and ping the household members that it has been completed.
In addition to adding friends and family, it would be motivating to compete against them. Earning points and climbing leaderboards would help the user want to do tasks and keep a routine going, while earning bragging rights.
During interviews, we learned that peoples' upbringing was a huge factor in their cleanliness. Not everyone learned best practices or routines from their family. It would be beneficial to have coaching videos to teach our user the best way to tackle chores.
Wouldn't it be great to trade in points for coupons on cleaning supplies? Saving money would be a huge motivation for people to want to clean.
I hope you enjoyed reading this case study as much as I loved working on it.
