(GR3) Paper Prototyping - Laundry Quandary

Prototype Photos

Note: all photos from second prototype.

Task 1:

Task 2:

Task 3:

Task 4:

Briefing

Laundry Quandary is a phone application for residents in living spaces with communal laundry machines. Often in such public laundry facilities, the number of machines is limited, and there are not enough dryers or washers for all those who want to use the laundry at a particular time. Users do not have a reliable way to check several aspects of the laundry facility without being present in the laundry room:

• Whether any machines are open
• How long the wait time is to start a new load of laundry
• Whether the user's laundry is finished
• What to do if a machine has finished running, but someone else's clothes are still in it

Our application will allow users to set up a laundry checking system. It will provide automatic notifications to users when their laundry finishes, allow users to leaves notes with laundry care instructions, and give users a way to view the current status of all laundry machines remotely.

Scenario Tasks

Task 1

You want to wash a load of clothing. Pick an open washer, and ask to be notified when your laundry is done washing.

Task 2

Leave a note with your laundry.

Task 3

Read a message that a previous user left with their laundry.  Respond to the message, asking for clarifying instructions.

Task 4

You want to wash your clothes, but all washers are currently in use.  Ask to be notified when the next washing machine becomes available.

Observations

Our testing revealed several improvements to be made to each design iteration. It was also useful for finding possible avenues of expansion for this project.

First Prototype

In testing our first prototype, we discovered that part of our prototype didn't come in to play at all. Users found our home screen intuitive enough that they did not need to use the map view of their laundry room.

In the third task, our first user had a few difficulties. While she was able to find the note from the previous user of her washing machine, the affordance for replying to the note was not very clear to her. The display of "Message User" was in a box that was not implying three dimensions, so she thought that it was just instructions and she "closed" our popover, choosing "Leave your own note" to reply to the user's message! We had to make the function of contacting a previous user more intuitive and immediately learnable. 

All of our initial user testers asked about our use of the word "Idle" to describe some laundry machines. We had meant for this term to indicate that a machine had finished running but was still full of clothing; such a machine could be used if the user was willing to move the previous user's laundry. Some users understood this idea with thought, and others needed an explanation, but when we asked for comments this was the most frequently indicated problem. We had to pick a clearer term for this concept. Another thought that came up when we were testing this aspect was the idea that the clothes that had been waiting longer should be moved out first, and we decided to include this concept in our next design.

Second Prototype

After our second round of prototyping, we discovered that our prototype did not handle some additional cases that would be simple to add. For example, if a person leaves a note, it is easy to contact them, but we did not handle the case where a user chooses not to leave a note but still should be contactable. We can fix this by adding "Message previous user" to the machine information panel (second picture under task 1) when there is no note that would be "from previous user". 

In order to clarify the label "Idle", we changed the text to "Idle for 10 minutes", intending to indicate that the machine had been waiting for some length of time with clothes still in it. This was still unclear, so in the next testing phase we want to put "Finished for 10 minutes" to make it quite clear that we mean the machine has finished running. Users thought that either the machine was broken, paused, or empty when we showed them the word "Idle", so we decided to remove this altogether.

We didn't have any further problems with replying functions.

Sometimes, our testers expected to have the ability to claim machines. We decided that this would introduce too many usability problems, because it is possible that some users of the laundry room would not use our application. We want the app to add to existing functionality without being necessary to the function of the laundry room.

Potential Changes

During our second round of testing, we arrived at several avenues for expanding our user interface and improving it. For example, currently we decided to have our application show only machines that are considered "usable". It might not be difficult to have the entire set of machines displayed or displayable, so that one might be able to view a note on a machine that is currently running.

We should also consider the idea of putting two columns of machines in the interface. While this challenges the simplicity of our display, a room with more machines may challenge the usability of our interface. Right now, we put all the machines in a scrollable list downward, with washers on top and dryers at the bottom. We should consider putting these types side-by-side instead, so that in a room with many washers, the dryers are not pushed past the limits of the screen. Our display has condensed the information we want into a row format, and with two columns we would lose the width we use, but we should still consider solving this problem. We do not want users to have to scroll to reach the first dryer.

Prototype Iteration

Based on the observed interaction with task 3, we decided to change our popover to reflect a 3-D button marked "Reply" instead of "Message User," as seen in our second prototype iteration. We also changed the "Leave your own note" caption to "Leave instructions," which is less likely to be confused for replying functionality.

Additionally, our first prototype iteration, testers found our use of the word "Idle" to be ambiguous (see observation above).  For our second prototype iteration, we changed the label to read "Idle for X minutes", where X would be the amount of time since that particular washer finished its cycle.  Testers found this to be preferable to the previous label.  For further iterations, we are considering changing the text of the label to read "Finished X minutes ago", which we feel more clearly indicates the meaning of the label.

Finally, our first iteration had included a "View Map" button at the bottom of the design homepage.  We found, however, that testers really didn't feel a need for this button, so we removed it for our second prototype iteration.  Testers of the second iteration didn't seem to notice that the button was missing.  Further discussion is needed to understand what functionality a "View Map" button would bring to our design before our design is implemented.

Return to Laundry Quandary homepage.