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.
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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".
The attempt at clarifying Idle put 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.
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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 changes 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.
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