User Enactment 1: Cube
After a long night of doing homework, you walk through the house to monitor the cleanliness of your home. Everything looks relatively clean to you. You decide to double check by checking out your cube, which you keep on the counter. Each side of the cube is assigned to one communal space in the apartment. The cube lights up and changes color if the surface needs to be cleaned. For example, your bathroom lights up after a week. You know that you need to clean it. The kitchen counters and tidy up sides are lit up. You check your phone, and look at your cleaning schedule. You realize that you're overdue with cleaning these spaces and decide to take care of them.
User Enactment 2: Scheduler
You choose how often you would like certain aspects of their home to be cleaned (e.g. vacuuming and counters once a week). You come home from a long day of work. The system detects that you’ve gotten home using bluetooth sensors and that they aren’t supposed to be at school or work according to their calendar. The system detects that you are one day late with vacuuming and three days late with cleaning the counters. The system detects that you have some time and suggests that you clean certain areas of the house by sending you a push notification.
User Enactment 3: Display
You come home from a long day’s work. You notice that the bathroom looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in two weeks. You check a display to figure out who is in charge of the area for this week. You mark the area as unclean by pushing a button on the display, but you also have to type in a comment. This sends a reminder to the individual in charge. The person responsible gets the notification on their phone, and sees that he can earn more points if they clean the space within the next 24 hours. He takes off his headphones and heads straight for the bathroom.
User Enactment 4: Augmented Reality Cleaning
On Sunday evening, you decide it’s time for a weekly cleaning. You open up the camera app on their mobile phone and scan the communal spaces - kitchen, living room, bathroom. You scan the surrounding environment using the phone and sees that the floors are clean and are highlighted in green, but the kitchen counters are red. This indicates that the kitchen counters need to be cleaned. You see that you’ve earned points for scanning your home.
User Enactment 5: Smart Kitchen Counters
You come home from work and plan to prepare a dinner consisting of rice, vegetables, and chicken. You get your ingredients from the refrigerator, and put them on your counter. You start cooking your rice on the stove, and then take the chicken out and put it on a cutting board. You cut the chicken, and quickly rinse off your cutting board. Sensors you have placed on/near your countertop (where you usually prepare your food) detect that there is harmful bacteria (salmonella) on the counter. You, however, did not notice, since you cannot see salmonella. You see a display on your counter that tells you that salmonella has been detected. You also receive an alert on your phone notifying you that harmful bacteria has been detected on your countertop. You realize that some of the chicken juice dripped off of your cutting board onto your counter. You clean the counter with a safe cleaning product, and are assured that you will not be propagating cross-contamination in your food preparation.
User Enactment 6: Pictures
You take a picture of your space. The app pulls up a previous picture of the space’s clean state and compares the two images. It gives a score on a scale of 0-100 to evaluate how closely the current picture mirrors the clean state. The app tells them that it’s okay to not clean if there’s a 50% or more match. The app reminds them to clean if the match score is less than 50%.
Analysis of User Enactments
We grounded our participants by asking them about their living situation (whether they live in an apartment and if they live with roommates) and explaining the purpose of the study. We brought them to a kitchen, so they knew that we were interested in designing a product that would support the cleanliness of communal spaces. Since they both fit our target audience (young college students or working professionals that live in an apartment with roommates), we did not need to explain the concept at length.
The following research questions can be answered by our user enactments:
The following research questions can be answered by our user enactments:
- How does the system should allow users to better detect the level of cleanliness of the home?
- What information can they not immediately glean from the visual cues or sense of touch and smell as they described?
- How can we use sensor technologies to help them better detect messes and germs that negatively impact the health of the home?
- How can a system launch and/or foster a fruitful conversation among busy young students about when they start cleaning and how they should allocate tasks?
- How can it help roommates hold each other accountable for cleaning tasks that they have been assigned?
- Cleaning also requires a fair amount of coordination and communication among roommates. How can this system make this allocation of tasks more efficient?
- For the Display User Enactment, both participants expressed that they would like to have another button to say, “I’ll Clean It.” They said that asking someone else to clean it again may result in tension and even negative conflict, and they would realistically take matters into their own hands. They also pointed out that the button label could be revised to sound more polite and less direct, to say “Request to Clean Again” or “Mark as Unclean” instead of “Please Clean Again.”
- Users appreciated the interactive and artistic elements of the cube.
- The smart kitchen counters user enactment showed that people appreciate contextual feedback (on the counter itself) and would prefer to get push notifications only if they were away from the display. Too many notifications would feel redundant and even unmeaningful.
- While our users said that receiving notifications would likely change their behavior or encourage them to do so, they mentioned that they would become annoyed with too many notifications and would eventually default to ignoring them or working around them to make them stop.
- Our participants liked the idea of the display for scheduling tasks and holding users accountable, but explained that it is likely that people's experience with it would differ based on the number and nature of roommates that they have. For example, the app would not afford anonymity where there are only two roommates, and could cause passive-aggressiveness. Conversely, for one more outgoing participant who is not afraid of confrontation, the display idea seemed like an effective way to communicate with roommates beyond personal text message conversations and to keep track of tasks.
- Those who participated in our first round of enactments indicated that they prefer more visual representations of cleanliness and tasks. For example, our users indicated that they would like for each side of the cube idea to have a different color which could be associated with a particular room or task as opposed to only using words. A second color would indicate the status of the room or task.
- Our users thought that while our augmented reality idea is cool and futuristic, they did not feel that it is entirely practical or that it would be an option that they would interact with for a sustained amount of time. They explained that while they appreciate the novelty of the idea, it overcomplicates cleaning for them. This feedback is a great example of how sometimes technological interventions can over-operationalize or complicate tasks more than is necessary.
- If we are to continue with the Pictures Enactment, it would be best to set the bar a little higher, as participants commented that 50% seemed too low to seem “satisfactory.” They recommended setting 70% matching as the minimum bar.