Neat - An ambient display

The problem

Most people aspire to live in a clean home but often fail to make the time or simply become apathetic at the thought of having to do yet another chore. Yet, having a clean home not only has several health benefits like reducing allergies, but also has a psychological component, reducing a major source of stress in the house. The problem is that cleaning is not a top priority for many. People would rather spend their free time with their families and having fun than performing tedious house chores.

The Solution

Our goal is to create a design that promotes the idea of a clean house without introducing more work for the user. Our solution is an ambient display to be placed at a highly trafficked area of the house. This hub enlists the help of other smart devices around the house like TVs, computers, smartphones, smart bands, and such for data collection and data output. Our system uses current motivators in the form of internal and external triggers (e.g. people coming over, how long has it really been since you last cleaned an area, etc) to get you cleaning. Finally, the hub processes your home and personal data to show you information about your house’s level of cleanliness helping you keep your house neat.

User Research - Contextual Inquiries

We performed four contextual inquiries to learn how participants managed their cleaning chores. These are some of our research findings:

Persona

Dave, 28 - Surgery Resident - Seattle, WA

Dave likes to have a clean and organized home. However, he spends 12-18h shifts at the hospital. Once he arrives home after a long day, dave does not want to spend the little time he has on cleaning, he rather spends that time having fun or with friends and family. 

Design Sketches

Chosen tasks

For our final design we decided to support the following tasks:

Storyboards

Paper Prototype

Testing

We performed 3 heuristic evaluations of the design and 3 usability testings sections with potential users throughout our design process to ensure that we had an intuitive, user friendly interface.

Digital Mockup