Broomies: Household Chore Division and Tracking for Roommates
What I did
UX Research Wireframing Prototyping
timeline
2 days
Scope
2 Designers 2 Product Managers
In a nutshell
Students in shared living use ineffective chore tracking systems and have difficulties maintaining equal effort and accountability. Broomies is an app that helps manage and divide of a variety of household tasks and uses photo verification and money to increase incentive and accountability.
This project is a submission for UX Open, a 2-day Design competition hosted by UBC Biztech with 70+ participants.
Many university students live in a dorm or a rented space at one time or another. Drawing from our team's personal experiences, we know how challenging it can be to live and share a space with others.
"Who's doing the dishes this time? When do we need to take out the trash again? I think I did it last week... can you do it this time?"
This lack of coordination and accountability can lead to uncompleted chores, misunderstandings, and tension among roommates.
But it's not just us
We decided to validate our research by sending out a survey and interviewing 5 people with current or past experience living with roommates. Here are the main pain points that they collectively face:
After some quick competitive analysis of other household task-splitting apps, we discovered that many of them lack accountability and an incentive to actually complete those tasks and check it off in the app.
With our research and analysis, we used the How Might We statement below to guide our solution.
How might we help university students living with new roommates easily divide, track, and stay accountable for household chores, so they can maintain a clean and organized shared space while reducing misunderstandings and promoting teamwork?
Solution
Divide and track chores with Broomies
Broomies is a household task tracker for students in shared living to split tasks and hold each other accountable.
Breathing Life into Broomies
To tie our visual identity together, we created a mini style guide that met the WCAG color contrast recommendations to ensure accessibility for all users. Our mascot, Broomie, was born to give encouragement and add delight to the user experience (thanks Rayna!).
Final Product
Let's Get Broomin'!
In under 24 hours, we created an onboarding, task creation, and task completion flow. Try our prototype to see it in action (Press "R" to restart).