Initial Concept
The original idea was to create an app that kept track of when common spaces were used and disinfected. The app would also keep track of a guest list, so that users could see who and when their roommates had visitors.
Interviews
Our main goal in the interview process was to decide whether we wanted to pursue contact-tracing or cleaning functionality. To conduct interviews, our team split into groups of two, with one primary interviewer and one secondary interviewer/scribe. I participated in two interviews so I could try out the role of both primary and secondary interviewer. We went into the interviews with two qualifying questions, four potential follow-up questions, and eight topics that we wanted to try to bring up if it came about naturally during our time. After the interview, the primary and secondary interviewer would do a progress review to go over the notes and add any important information. After the whole group completed all the interviews,we got together to share our individual findings and synthesize our data into behavioral variables and demographic variables. We found that most of our interviewees already had plans in place for cleaning and few had set ground rules for hosting guests in their living spaces. They also had no plan if a housemate or visitor tested positive for COVID.
Personas, Scenarios, & User Requirements
Using the information we got from the interviews and behavioral and demographic variables, the next step for our class was to create a primary persona and a secondary persona and create a scenario and user requirements for each. I worked with another teammate to create these assignments for the primary persona, Emma Somers.We first worked together to decide how informed Emma is on COVID, quarantining and the cleaning and visitor rules within her house. Then my partner and I split up the remaining tasks with me using the scenario that my partner would create and extracting the corresponding user requi rements. Included below is a snippet of the user requirements, along with the scenario it came from.
Scenario |
User Requirements |
When she first opens the app, Emma creates a profile for herself. Emma is the kind of person to be checking the medical numbers on the regular and intends to test herself as often as necessary in the coming months, so it's a relief to see how mutable this setting in the app is! Since she's been tested recently and received a negative result, Quarmate lets Emma know she's all cleared from the need to quarantine. |
- Ability to create profile - Ability to check medical info and numbers - Ability to monitor COVID testing and quarantine protocols |
Once she's set her profile pic and is satisfied with her personalized app theme, she chooses to create a "new residence" profile, lovingly naming it the "Blue Mansion." She then invites the rest of the gals to join the existing housing profile. |
- Ability to personalize user profile - Ability to create and name home profile - Ability invite others to join home profile |
On the next screen, Emma begins to "construct the house", or add rooms, like the common room/ living room, kitchen, dining room, two bathrooms, and the five bedrooms in the house. For each room, she adds those who should have access to the space, i.e. only herself to her own bedroom, and sets the current status for cleanliness. Particularly noting how Claire L. had forgotten to wipe surfaces in the dining room for the past few days, Emma sets the status to "needs cleaning" and flags her profile for responsibility. |
- Ability to personalize home profile - Ability to assign/place users to different parts of home profile - Ability to enter status of room - Ability to enter tasks/chores and assign (manually or through app) to users |
System Requirements
From the user requirements, I created the system requirements that explained what we wanted users to accomplish within our app.
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1. User profile A. The user should be about to create a user profile 1. Specify name,whether or not they have been tested and test results 2. Additional option to add a photo 2. Home profile A. Users should be able to create a home profile 1. Add/label rooms to the home database, and specify which housemates use that room B. Users should be able to interact with existing home profiles 1. Invite other user profiles to home profile you have created or search for home profile of existing users C. Users should be able to edit the home profile 1. Add/edit rooms assignments after initial setup 2. Mark as clean or in need of cleaning 3. Mark who is in the room at a given time 3. Interaction A. Users should be able to interact with other users 1. Message users in same home profile 2. Ask other users if you can bring guests over and have roommates approve or disapprove 3. Invite users to your home profile (see 2c) B. Users should be able to interact wi th home profile (see 2b) 1. Invite others to join home profile (see 2b) 2. Assign/place users to individual rooms 3. Enter tasks/chores and assign to users 4. Notify roomates what room their guests will be in 5. Update and track user & guest room movement status 4. Medical A. Check/edit their own COVID-19 testing status, symptom presentation B. Monitor COVID testing status and symptom presentation of housemates, guests 5. Log A. Ability to end visit and save log of what rooms they stayed in B. Automatic removal of visi tor log after 14 days |
Implementation
I worked with another teammate to write a design doc for a more detailed explanation of what we wanted our app to do and each screen we planned on creating, using the system requirements as a reference. After that the team created an implementation plan to assign ourselves roles and create a timeline of what we planned on completing for the next few weeks to have a functioning app to demo during the final week of the quarter. I choose to work on the frontend implementation, with the first task being to create a high-fidelity prototype on Figma.
High-Fidelity Prototype
Our final project had three screens; the home profile, the user profile, and the visitor log. I was in charge of designing and coding the frontend for the home profile,which stores a collection of housemates, a collection of rooms, a master list of chores with the person each item is assigned to, and a link for the user to send their roommates a request to have a visitor.
Lessons Learned
From this project, I learned how to take the quantitative and qualitative data gained from the interviews, personas, scenarios, and others to design and code the minimum viable product. For the next iteration of this app, I would add a vaccination status to the profiles of the users and add a contact tracing feature for roommates and guests.
