Laundro
An improved laundromat experience.
Laundro is an application made to assist people who use commercial laundromats or shared laundry spaces in congregate living spaces. Laundro allows users to locate laundry services, reserve machines in advance, pay for their services, monitor the status of ongoing sessions and report broken machines all from their phone.
Process
The number of laundry facilities in the U.S. has declined by almost 20% since 2005. This drop is especially prevalent in metropolitan areas such as Chicago, which has seen a 23% drop. Laundry services have many common issues that frustrate most patrons such as a lack of availability of machines during high-traffic times, waiting times in laundry rooms, and broken machines that are not reported or fixed. We aimed to address these issues with our application.
PACT Analysis
To begin, we created a PACT analysis. In this analysis, we considered the various ways in which someone might use our application. We then considered our app idea in the context of each category and summarized our intentions of what the app would do. This gave us a firm idea of what exactly we wanted to achieve with our application.
System Requirement Chart
Once we knew what we wanted our application to do, we had to come up with the exact list of features that would allow us to achieve our goal. We then ranked these features in terms of priority: what we must have in our app, what we should have, what we could include and what we would include in future versions. We then took these lists of features and mapped out where they would fit on a site map.
Site Map
We then took our list of features and organized them into a hypothetical site map. This helped us start to break our content down into groups and define the key features of our app. From here, we organized the must-have features of the pact analysis into a hypothetical sitemap to give an idea of what features would go where.
User Personas
We then took on the perspective of potential users and constructed user personas that we wanted to target with our application. Each included a brief description of the person, their laundry habits and the frustrations they experience when using a laundromat. We created user scenarios for these personas, looking at a problem that they have and walking step-by-step through the scenario to determine how the problem could be solved with our application.
Interviews
Next, we conducted interviews with people who use shared-laundry spaces. Our goal was to understand the process that people go through when using said spaces. This includes their general routine, the common challenges they experience, and the positive experiences they have had using these spaces. As we gathered this information, we kept three big questions in mind:
1. What is the common laundromat experience?
2. What challenges are experienced when doing laundry in a shared laundry space and what are the solutions?
3. If there was an app designed to address the challenges of using a shared laundry space, what features would that include?
Wireframes and Visual Comps
Informed by our interviews, we came back to the user scenarios we made based on the user personas and began to create wireframes for each scenario. After creating our wireframes, we began to develop a visual style and created various visual comps as we decided on a style for our application. We then applied that style onto each of the wireframes and connected them together to create our user testing prototype.
User Testing
We then began user testing from this prototype. We invited users who have experience with using shared laundry spaces to come and test our application with the goal of exploring three main areas: The ease of navigation, the effectiveness of the user interface, and the usefulness of the application.
Each user scenario became a user objective that our participant testers were tasked with. We watched them use the app to see what they would do. We took detailed notes throughout and noted the errors that occurred. We determined whether the task was completed successfully and made note of any technical errors that occurred. We noted any other issues the users experienced when performing along with other key insights we gained from the testing.
Application of Style and Informed Changes
Using the insight we gained from our user testing, we refined our visual style and created a style guide to ensure design consistency throughout the app. Along with applying the final style, we also used our user testing information to address the common issues that our users faced when navigating and using our application.
