Design 3
This is the home screen of the application in this design. On the left is the screen as Ginny first sees it. Ginny's username is displayed on the top right. Only information about usable machines is displayed on this page. Each type of machine gets a number (in the lower left of its section) indicating how many of that type are currently available in the laundry room. Thus, there are no empty washers (top left section) but there is one washer that is idle, yet full (bottom left section). Arrows are used to indicate the movement of laundry; in the icons,
To the right, the final screen Ginny sees is displayed. After Ginny sets her note and loads her laundry into the washer, the application returns her to her home screen. From here, she can now see a new progress bar, indicating how far her laundry has yet to go via both the bar and the text display of the time remaining. The text to the top left of the bar is the beginning of the note Ginny left. The small icon to the left of the progress bar is used to show whether the machine in question is a washer or a dryer. If Ginny wishes to check the remaining time of her laundry again, she opens the application and is returned to this page.
This page is the interface used for interacting with notes. On the left, we see the mildly confusing note left for Ginny by the owner of the laundry she is moving. Ginny is afforded the options to call or text this person, or to simply tap the "Done" button. If she chooses to call or text, the relevant application (Phone or Messaging, for Android) comes up to handle the task. Ginny texts the other person, and receives appropriate instructions. Upon returning to the laundry application, Ginny sees this screen again, and taps the "Done" button. She is taken directly to the "Leave a Note" page displayed on the right.
The page to the right begins with an empty note, with the same "Done" checkbox at the bottom. There is a cursor in the text box, indicating that Ginny can enter text using the Android on-screen keyboard when the text box receives focus. Ginny enters her laundry instructions. Three boxes and captions at the bottom right indicate how Ginny wants other users to be able to interact with her. The crossed-out Phone shows that Ginny does not want to receive calls about her laundry; the second box indicates that she would like others to be able to text her about it, and the third indicates that she would like to receive a notification when her laundry finishes. These boxes can be toggled to On/Off via a tap. Ginny taps done and returns to the home screen (shown above).
Analysis
Learnability
This interface has a few learnability issues, mostly with the home page. The choice to use icons to display the different machine types was meant to reduce the amount of text involved in the interface, but they might be confusing. The icons in the final product (if this design element remains) need to be carefully chosen to be as intuitive as possible. The "water bucket" icon for a washer is pretty reasonable, but the "box with a port hole" icon for a dryer is not. Such a box could easily indicate a dryer or a washer! The arrows muddy up the design with needless complexity; perhaps another way could be found to describe the state of the machines.
It is not intuitive that the app would display fewer machines than are in the laundry room; this application does not display any information about dryers that are currently in use. But, displaying useful machines as a fraction of available machines would add extra text and complexity. In addition, the full/empty state of a machine might not be clear from the icon given. It could be that the visually similar icons will be enough for a user to tell a full dryer from an empty one, but a more universal way to communicate this idea might also be possible.
Some good points about the learnability of this design are its consistencies with other Android applications and with itself. The app uses the default icons for text Messaging and Phone calls, providing good external consistency within the realm of mobile applications. The user would probably recognize these icons and intuit their functions accordingly. Also, the application displays internal consistency by having the same screen perform multiple functions. The home screen also acts as the display of time remaining, once the user's laundry is in a machine. Another point of consistency is that the interface for reading notes is very similar to the interface for writing them. In order to get the user to recognize the text box for entering their new note, some highlighted default text could be used, along with bringing up the on-screen keyboard immediately upon entering this screen. To demonstrate these consistencies, each screen is placed next to its most consistent matching screen in this design proposal.
Efficiency
This application should be efficient to use. An expert user would immediately know at the home screen how many machines are available, and be able to claim a machine quickly and without errors. There are a few points where the application could be made more efficient with some additional functions. The ability to know how much time is left on machines would be useful, but it would change the design since it would need a way to display information on all machines. An additional function that would not require much in design changes would be the ability to be notified when a machine frees up; this would make users of the app able to check the app only once before being able to put in a load of laundry.
Another point on efficiency would be added if the ability to save notes and re-use them were added. This would be simple if the "Leave a note" line had a drop-down arrow, with previous note titles there. This would also require dealing with the idea of "titles" for notes; for simplicity's sake the current note interface has only one text box. This single-text box approach improves efficiency in the short run (the first time a note is written) but avoids the ability to re-use notes, which would be a boon to longer-term efficiency.
Having all the possible enabling icons in the same place on the "Leave a Note" page as essentially check-boxes (with highlighting instead of checks) makes changing these options pretty efficient.
Safety
The ability to edit a note would be one possible safety feature to add to this design. We could enable this by allowing the user to edit the note visible from the home page. The interaction between this possible feature and the idea of saving notes might have to be carefully managed. The app enables better safety than the "naive approach" to laundry because it enables the possibility of contacting the owner of a load of laundry to inquire about instructions.
Other safety issues with this app include the irreversibility of some decisions. For example, if a user clicks "Done" by mistake from the page where one can view a note left by another user, then in the current version it seems impossible to reverse this decision. The app should reverse decisions and return to previous pages when the Android "back" button (bottom left) is pressed.