My group and I haven’t completed the prototyping phase yet. We were totally split up this weekend, and because the prototyping process is an extremely collaborative process, we weren’t able to make any group progress between class periods. However, during class last Thursday, we were able to finalize an outline for what our prototype would be. This gave us an opportunity individually finish separate parts of the app, then blend them together in one collaborative session. Once we combine our parts, we will only need to make formatting edits and proofreads. (Heads up: I spent the weekend in Philadelphia playing Villanova in football, Cole was in LA visiting an old friend, and Claudia was at a concert in New York City. We were granted an extension of our prototype due-date from Tuesday to Thursday of this week.)
Our prototype is an app. As a refresher, we are designing a social & community building app that will help coordinate payments among roommates, roommate schedules, apartment-wide activities, and room & space reservations. It will be paid for by landlords or apartment building management companies and will be used by tenants within the apartment complexes. We’re using the online platform “Marvel” to create a functional app on our phones and laptops. While Powerpoint would be an easier alternative in the short run, we chose to use Marvel because of its immersive end-product. Marvel will let people experience our app just like they would any other app on their phones. Using it lets us create the closest thing to a real app, giving our prototype much more legitimacy than Powerpoint. Although a Powerpoint app would be quicker to create and would give our focus groups/interviewees a baseline idea of what our app would entail, it would lack the modern vibe that nearly every app reveals.
We were able to complete some work prior to going our separate ways last weekend. Thankfully, we designed a great work plan to attack our work individually before combining everything. The home page, which has already been created, will include a Search Bar, payment platform, individual calendar, a housemate section, amenity notifications, space reservations, public postings, and an apartment directory. I’m in charge of payment, public postings, and the directory. Jessica has the individual calendar and housemate section. Cole has the app’s introductory & sign-up pages along with the space reservations page. Claudia has the main page and amenity notifications.
2 of my sections, public postings and the directory, are very straightforward. They have been easy to prototype. However, designing the payment platform has proven to be much more complex. I’ve used the app Splitwise as my inspiration for this feature on our app. I use it with my current roommates to stay up to speed on our rent, bills, groceries, etc. Splitwise uses services like PayPal and Venmo for groups of people to each contribute to a lump sum payment. The app’s interface is simple. There are long-term groups users can make (like my roommates and I have) and there are options to do one-time uses within the app as well. When taking inspiration from Splitwise and applying it to the specific way in which our app will be used, I cdevised with 3 main funtions within the payment platform: Rent, Bills, and Friend Spend.
Rent lets you pay your landlord through the app. It gives a timestamp to each payment and keeps track between roommates of who has and hasn’t paid yet.
Bills work similarly to the Rent section. As each apartment complex offers different utility payment packages and some apartments might have different amenities than others, each apartment will have custom simple clip-art samples to represent show which bills have and haven’t been paid. The types of bills to be paid will be finalized in the introductory stage of the app (Cole’s section).
The Friend Spend portion is almost exactly what Splitwise is, but on much more simple scale. It’s only applicable to roommates and will keep track of how much you are owed compared to how much you owe.