WeTask — Socialize Your Daily Routine
Contributors: Arjun Singh, Hannah Bi, Jacob Laxton, Wen Qiu
Household chores are boring and isolated- but what if we add a social component to them? For our Human-Computer Interaction class project, our group intends to support communities among Chinese American stay at home moms by addressing the limitations they face when seeking social interaction. Such limitations can include busy schedules that require their presence in the house as well as language barriers that prevent them from meeting new people. An additional consequence of these busy schedules and social isolation is difficulty scheduling proper self-care and exercise. Our proposed solution utilizes a wearable and a smartphone app acting as an extension for a few extra features. Through the wearable, our users can engage in spontaneous voice calls while completing a shared task with their friends, or even a fellow mom they have never met before. This presents a way for stay at home moms to meet and socialize with other stay at home moms while doing their regular daily tasks without compromising either activity.
Design Research Goals and Participants
We began our process by conducting user research in order to discover how we could best support the community of Chinese American stay at home moms. Specifically, we were interested in learning about their daily routines and social interaction patterns. While we understood that direct observation could be a valuable approach for studying our community, we instead chose to conduct virtual interviews and surveys to follow current pandemic safety protocols. In order to gain direct insights into the problems they faced and hear their personal story, our group conducted four virtual interviews with Chinese American moms who immigrated to the US. Specifically, our participants had been stay at home moms for at least a year. After the interviews, we dispersed a short survey to collect quantitative data and determine whether our interview findings could be generalized to the community as a whole. Our survey, which was sent through two teammates’ networks of family connections, received seventeen responses and further expanded our understanding of our target community.
Design Research Results and Themes
Through our research, we found three prominent themes that inspired our design. The first theme was the importance of friend support and social interactions for the well-being of stay at home moms. When our participants asked to recall the biggest challenges they encountered when transitioning into the role of a stay at home mom, the second most common response, behind limited childcare skills, was the difficulty in meeting new people. This result is reasonable given the isolated nature of their household chores. Many survey participants also identified friend support as one of the major factors that helped with their transition. For example, our second interviewee runs a successful side business selling home-made baked goods. “At first, I have no confidence in actually starting a business,” she said during the interview, “but my friends encouraged me and even helped me promote my products. This was how it started.” This illustrates how social connection enhances the sense of identity and belonging of stay at home moms, which further brings out their true potential.
The second theme we found is the value of self-care. When asked what advice they would give to fellow stay at home moms, nearly half of our survey participants responded “do something you are passionate about” and “take good care of yourself”. In addition, all four of our interviewees incorporated exercises like walking and running into their daily routine. This shows that though stay at home moms hold a family-centered role, they still desire personal development and reserving time for themselves from their family duties.
While social connections and self-care are highly valued by our research participants, not all stay at home moms have the luxury to enjoy these activities due to tension between family responsibilities and personal time. For example, one of our interviewees mentioned the desire to take some classes for self-improvement when her kid was young, but the daycare time from 8 am to 2 pm was too limited for her to perform any meaningful activity. This issue becomes even more prominent due to the pandemic, which forces back family members from the school and the workplace. Three of our interviewees reported reduced time for themselves as they need to take care of family members during the day, which makes it harder for them to engage in organized social and self-care activities.
Proposed Design
During interviews, we found that the daily routines for stay at home moms are relatively consistent throughout the day. Additionally, we also observed the need to balance family duty and personal time. Facilitating virtual social interactions during daily routine tasks would be a feasible way to balance the two without compromise. We decided that a smartwatch wearable would provide a quick and ever-present way for a user to track activities, and the visual interface provides just the right amount of information to keep app interaction simple and intuitive.
WeTask is a spontaneous way for stay at home moms to socialize throughout the day, and works by connecting users tracking similar activities at the same time via voice call. Using the wearable app, a user can start a task (exercising, gardening, etc.) and either set it to private (for tracking purposes only), friends-only, or public (allowing anyone, including strangers, to join). If their friends are doing public or friends-only tasks, the user can also see them and choose to join. In addition, they can turn on notifications for certain tasks and view tracking history in the companion phone app. WeTask provides convenience in choosing to track and participate in shared tasks, resulting in spontaneous social interactions sprinkled throughout the day.
While the main portion of WeTask lies in the more convenient wearable app, the companion phone app is an interface for more advanced actions like tracking history and settings. Users can perform more complicated interactions such as configuring the details of their tasks and changing notification preferences. To leverage existing social connections, users can also link the app to their social media (primarily WeChat for Chinese Americans) and import their contacts who are also using our app.
We believe that WeTask can address the needs of the community since social interaction makes potentially isolated activities like chores or exercising more enjoyable. The storyboard below illustrates one such scenario that shows how our app encourages stay at home moms to budget time for self-care and exercise.
As seen in the above scenario, connecting with others is easy, since it requires only the wearable. However, we do recommend the use of headphones because it will provide the ideal experience while the user is performing a task.
Next Steps
The user research process has given us valuable insights on a community different from all our group members. We are very excited about the potential of our proposed design concept in serving the Chinese American stay at home moms, and we look forward to improving our design via prototyping, usability testing, and future design iterations.
