(sh)Errands is a social errand-sharing tool where housemates, friends, or family can consolidate trips to the pharmacy, grocery store, or any other location to make errands easier for busy people.
Based on my findings in Design 1.1, the only real specific service that one of the people I interviewed had a problem with was Costco's ordering feature. Since that had a lot to do with the data management of Costco's system, I decided to broaden that idea and make it more geared to the person who may be running other errands besides making massive food orders every week.
I came up with some ideas that would change how people did errands and remembered appointments.
1. An app that you plug in your list of needs (shampoo, laundry detergent, groceries, gauze, etc.) and it tells you where to get what you need in the fewest number of stops. (A friend not in CS 160 pointed out that this would be most useful in a situation where you did not know your surroundings, such as if you were on a business trip or on vacation).
2. A delivery service for your errands, similar to Google's Shopping Express, but for picking up dry cleaning, going to the laundromat, going grocery shopping, etc.
3. A mobile platform with e-mail and calendar integration to consolidate all of your appointments and your lists of errands.
4. An app that notifies you when you might be running out of something. "You bought toilet paper three weeks ago, you might need to buy it this week!"
5. An app with calendar integration that reminds you to do things like laundry when you have breaks in your schedule. "You have the next three hours off! Throw in a load of laundry?"
6. A calendar widget to put in the addresses of all the places you might need to go to (the salon, the dentist, the doctor), and it will calculate travel time and remind you to run certain errands.
7. A pharmacy companion app to keep track of when you have to refill what medication.
8. A reminder to do the things that only happen every once in a while (re-order contact lenses every 6 months, make a dentist appointment twice a year, go to the doc for a yearly checkup, etc.)
9. An app to keep track of errands as they come up (refill shampoo, buy mascara, etc) until they reach critical mass to warrant actually going out and going to Walgreens.
10. Errands with friends- an online version of "I'm going to Target, need anything?"
11. Errand share- social way for roommates/housemates to divvy up errands. Assign errands to people, take on errands, etc.
12. Errands with a geo-tag so that when you're in the grocery store it reminds you that you needed eggs
13. Family errand consolidator so that kids, spouses can request items from stores when they think of them.
14. A service in the stores that allows you to call and get all the items you need together (or submit them through an app) and then you can just swing by and pick them up
15. A centralized errand service that will run errands for you and you just have to make one stop and pick them all up.
I decided to pursue a combination of 10 and 11, so I prototyped (sh)Errands, which allows people to create errand lists and share them with their friends, and for people to plan trips and see others' lists and grab things for them while they're at the store. I live in a house with 63 other girls, and while I know I'm not the user, I cannot tell you the number of times a week that my housemates go to Target, when they could just all consolidate their Target trips in some way and save gas, time, etc. I read the list to a few friends and they all agreed that this would be something that people with one or more housemates might actually use.
I tested out my application on a mother of two. She enjoyed the application overall.
Here's what I learned from her messing with the prototype for a few minutes
1. It took her several tries to access her friends' lists- something that I hadn't built into the functionality as she expected, because I didn't realize that a user would want to see others' lists outside the confines of planning a trip and seeing what everyone else wanted. It would help to build friends' lists into the Friends menu, so that could be accessed from anywhere.
2. She also initially didn't realize what "Plan Trip" does, and she mimed going to Target and buying things based on just seeing her lists, not going through the process of planning it out ahead of time.
3. She seemed to expect some sort of direct messaging feature to let her son (for example) know that she was going to Target without letting anyone else know.
4. She had no problem adding new items to lists or adding new lists. I'm assuming that this is because I modeled this functionality after Notes and Reminders in the iPhone. I'm not sure, however.
5. When shown the screen with friends that have shared lists, she was reading aloud and said "I can see Alex's lists, I can see Mary's lists, screw Mary I'm not buying her things, and I can notify my other friends!" This was good news to me because it indicated to me that these lists were suggestions of what you could buy if you wanted to, but you don't have to necessarily get everything on everyone's list.
6. Based on her desire to share with those that are in her direct family, I would probably add in some functionality for total sharing, which might include auto-updating them about your trips, or auto-sharing all your lists for people that you choose, such as your roommate, your children, your parents, or your spouse.
Those were the main things that I gathered from my brief test, and those are also several concrete things that I learned and could improve upon for the next iteration. Overall, I learned a lot about the good things and the bad things of my initial design, and it was a wonderful learning experience.
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