WeTask: Socialize Your Daily Routine (Part 2)

7 min readDec 9, 2020

Contributors: Arjun Singh, Hannah Bi, Jacob Laxton, Wen Qiu

In early November, our HCI project group conducted user research on the community of Chinese American stay-at-home moms with the goal of designing a solution for enhancing their community and addressing their social needs. We identified that their busy day, filled with household chores and limited social connections, results in few opportunities to make and keep connections outside their direct family. Thus, we proposed a solution to not only help Chinese American stay-at-home moms stay connected throughout their busy days at home, but also meet fellow stay-at-home moms.

Our Solution

With our user needs in mind, we designed WeTask, a smartwatch app with a companion smartphone app in the form of a WeChat mini-program. The two primary tasks that users can perform with WeTask include:

Start spontaneous conversations with other stay-at-home moms while completing their daily household chores, hobbies, or exercises. When the user begins any task throughout their day, they simply start tracking the task on their watch. Then, other users who are performing the same task at home can talk with each other over a voice call. Together, any group of users can perform their daily activities while virtually connecting with each other.
Connect and socialize with new people. While users can build new connections through friends of friends, they will also be recommended users by WeTask directly. These recommendations are curated by WeTask to find local users who perform similar tasks.

WeTask was directly influenced by our research finding that 80% of our sample community members said they would love a platform where stay-at-home moms can help each other. Through our solution users can not only engage in casual interactions, but also receive advice about different tasks in those contextual conversations. Another research finding that had a large influence on our design was that many Chinese American stay-at-home moms are not confident enough in their English speaking skills to engage in English speaking communities. To resolve this, we integrated our solution directly with WeChat, whose user base is over 90% Chinese. We also allow users to import their friends from WeChat to help them connect with users they already know. By centering our solution around a Chinese speaking community, we hope to allow all users to confidently engage in our platform regardless of their English speaking abilities.

We specifically chose the form of a smartwatch app due to its accessibility for casual use throughout the day. Since starting a task is only a few taps on the wrist away, users are more likely to start a task than if they had to use their phone. The companion phone app (design not included due to scope limitations) allows users to perform tasks that would be cumbersome on a watch, such as editing personal profiles or typing to search for friends.

Testing with Paper Prototype

After deciding on the platform, we created a paper prototype for our design interface. We then conducted three separate usability tests.

One of the biggest issues that our tests revealed was that users found the screen presented after starting or joining a task confusing due to unclear icons. Also, some actions on this screen were not obvious to them, such as leaving the call or viewing the participants. These results revealed to us that we would need to either replace icons with text, more universally understood symbols, or adding a help icon to display available actions.

We also observed confusion about the ordering of our five main screens and difficulty in finding the right screen for a task. To solve this issue, we initially reordered the screens. However, after additional feedback and researching other smartwatch app designs, we decided that five swipeable screens was too many and instead created a scrollable list of the various menu items on our second screen.

Final Digital Prototype

In our final design for the smartwatch app, we made sure to focus on the simplicity of each interaction. Leveraging our results from usability testing, we simplified the main interface to contain only two pages. One page is dedicated to starting and joining tasks, and one page for our other features. Below, we have outlined the interaction flow of our two primary tasks.

Engaging in conversations while performing a task

When starting a task, the user can set the visibility of their task to “All Friends”, “Me Only” (for personal tracking purpose), or select a subset of their friends. This allows them to have detailed control over who can join their conversations, preventing surprises when people join the call. If they are feeling adventurous, they can also choose to make their task visible to “Everyone”, making it available to all WeTask users.

When joining a task, users can either join a task started by one of their friends or join a recommended task started by users who are not their friends. They can see how long the tasks have been started for and how many people are in the task at a glance, as well as view the profiles of other participants before joining the call.

For the call screen we used a three page design. Users start at the middle screen displaying a timer for how long they have been in the task and the option to mute. If they swipe right, they can leave the task from the screen on the left. They can also lock the screen to prevent accidental interaction. The screen on the right shows a list of participants. Both are indicated on an overlay when users tap on the tooltip icon on the call screen.

Meeting and connecting with new people

Stay-at-home moms can meet new people if they choose to start or join a task visible to everyone. Alternatively, they can also meet friends of friends while joining a shared task or select from our list of recommended friends.

On the “Recommended Friends” view, they can view the profiles of recommended WeTask users and send a friend request. They can also dismiss the recommendation if they decide it’s not a good fit for them.

On the “My Friends” view, they can see a list of existing friends and also accept or dismiss friend requests from other WeTask users.

Once a user makes new friends through friend requests, their contact information (including their phone number and WeChat ID) in their WeTask profile will be made visible to their new friends. Users have complete freedom in deciding what to share on their profile due to privacy concerns, and they can edit related settings on the companion app.

Changes from initial digital prototype

After receiving feedback, we made some major improvements to our digital prototype. First of all, we reordered the menu and put “Recommended Friends” at the top instead of “Task History”, since friend recommendation is a crucial feature for our second task. We added the “Everyone” option to provide users with the option to engage in conversations with new people. We also fleshed out the friend system and displayed received friend requests on the “My Friends” view rather than the “Recommendation Friends” view, as well as the option to dismiss them.

Finally, we modified the “Settings” view to contain a toggle to turn on notifications for a whole category of tasks so users don’t have to tap on each task individually to enable notifications. We still kept the Language toggle at a prominent location, so Chinese American stay-at-home moms who are not comfortable using a full-English interface can make an easy switch to use the Chinese interface instead.

Conclusion

To summarize, our user research revealed that many Chinese American stay-at-home moms struggle to find time for personal interactions and new social connections. To address this problem, we designed WeTask, a smartwatch app that allows users to connect through a voice call with other Chinese American stay-at-home moms who are doing similar tasks. This enables our users to keep their social connections while meeting new people and making mundane tasks fun! We envision that our design would help users connect with their friends without sacrificing their daily responsibilities. We hope that WeTask leads Chinese American stay-at-home moms to feel supported and connected while enjoying their daily routine.