Broomies
Say goodbye to all of your roommate nightmares!
Overview
Broomies is a mobile app created to help facilitate fair and anonymous chore assignment among roommates. Users earn points for completing chores and can also track household expenses. These points are used to determine the monthly expense split among roommates, promoting timely chore completion.
Awarded the Best Use of CockroachDB serverless at Hack the North 2023.
Team: Gordon Wu, Isaac Zhu, Dennis Li, Rustam Nassyrov
Role: UX Designer
Software: Figma
Duration: September 2023
Problem
Living with roommates is often enjoyable and cost-effective, but it frequently poses challenges in terms of organizing responsibilities and holding everyone accountable. Initial attempts with whiteboards, calendars, or simple paper systems often lead to messy spreadsheets or uneven chore distribution, causing frustration and imbalance among roommates. Additionally, the common scenario of shared expenses can become complicated when someone agrees to make a purchase for others, resulting in potential forgetfulness and financial inconveniences.
Visualizing the Idea
Recognizing the inherent challenge of motivating users to complete chores led to the idea of incorporating gamification into Broomies, where points earned for completing chores would be linked to the monthly household expenses in some way. This connection fosters friendly competition among roommates, and the best part is that it actually involves activities that contribute to a more enjoyable living experience for everyone.
Broomies takes care of it all by seamlessly monitoring, distributing, and turning household tasks and shared spending into an engaging experience. Roommates now get the freedom to effortlessly oversee their responsibilities and expenses, ensuring a fair and hassle-free living arrangement.
Prototyping
Moving to low-fidelity sketches, extra time was invested to conceptualize the gamification process, ensuring the best user experience with roommates in mind. This strategic approach expedited high-fidelity mockup development, allowing the team to meet tight time constraints in a hackathon environment.
Usability Testing With a Twist
With Hack the North being 32 hours instead of the typical 24 hours for a hackathon, the extended timeframe was taken advantage of by conducting a small round of usability testing with my development team. This not only provided them with a well-needed break but also yielded feedback from a sample representing our target demographic - university students and graduates. Simultaneously, it helped gauge the feasibility of implementation from a developer's perspective.
User testing insights
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The swipe-to-complete feature proved less intuitive, resulting in user errors and increased time spent on completing assigned chores.
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While the add transaction feature showed good user learnability, its design posed feasibility challenges and couldn't be replicated in React Native.
Design Decisions
1. Implementing toggles
Toggles allow users to easily update the chore status from "In progress" to "Complete". This also gives users the option to switch it back in case of misclicks, where swiping didn't.
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Before
After
2. Expenses redesigned
Due to feasibility challenges in the initial design, the UI was redesigned from an originally horizontal layout to a more vertical layout. This creates a better user experience through ease of data entry, based on the information hierarchy.
Old design
New design
The Final Design
Leaderboards and performance savings
Users' monthly chore completion points are visible to all household members, impacting their performance savings. Those with higher points pay less during expense splitting at the end of each month.
Roommate standings
Performance savings
Chore management
Users can see all household chores for the week and their private assignments. Completing a chore is as simple as tapping the toggle, which will update the weekly list.
Notifications and reviews
Completed chores trigger notifications for all users, followed by options for anonymous reviews through reactions and comments, enhancing transparency.
Review
React/comment
Submit
View
Chore creation and assignment
The "Create" tab allows easy chore assignments including options to add icons, descriptions, weekly scheduling, and difficulty levels with corresponding point values.
Incomplete
Completed
What I Learned
Reflecting on my first hackathon experience, I transitioned from designathons where I would collaborate with a team of designers, to being the only designer in a team of four. The weight of responsibility increased tremendously, as my designs were key to our project's success. Nevertheless, after 32 pressuring hours filled with lots of passion and hard work, I'm extremely proud of bringing Broomies to life and walking away with a sponsor prize for the Best Use of CockroachDB serverless.
Looking ahead, our goal is to continue refining and eventually releasing Broomies on the app store. Future steps will include formal usability testing with detailed user personas, and accessibility-focused UI enhancements to make the Broomies experience even better.
P.S. The team at CockroachDB invited us onto their podcast!
Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaoD6t8OPDQ&t=559s&ab_channel=CockroachDB