An Ethnography Research of Smart House Sharing

In Australia, the experience of finding and living in a house has changed dramatically. Due to increasing house prices, more Australian residents are becoming renters. House sharing has become a significant trend alongside the shift. However, there is insufficient research on understanding the house-sharing phenomenon, and also how to improve it in the future. Being influenced by the “Smart” conception, which is generally recognised as the permeation of digital communication and smart living, house sharing is emerging as its own vertical which requires its own research focus to build a real-time understanding of this expanding trend.

Housing Futures: Smart and Shared? is a 3-year research project of Dr Sophie Maalsen, who has worked on it for 9 months before my participation. The project aims to explore the future of house sharing via leveraging smart technology and digital ethnography. It assumes to provide reconceptualisation of smart house sharing in both theory and policy, and also be methodologically innovative in ethnographic research. My research was based on the project to find out potentials on Smart house-sharing within an interaction design scope and mainly highlights financial aspects and behaviour changes during house sharing.

Design

Ethnography User Research
Prototyping
User Testing

Aims, Scope & Targeted Aspects

The bulk of my research is primarily concentrated on two in-depth and narrowed aims below.

Understand how smart technology can profoundly influence the growing house-sharing trend.

Accompanying the booming acceleration of the smart living industry, smart technologies such as wireless connectivity and smart applications started to be applied to house sharing. By observing and interviewing people with regards to their interaction with smart technology, I explore new solutions that can be implemented to enhance practicality and even affect the house-sharing market as well as the policy which governs it.

How smart technology can improve data collection methodology, more powerful and more convenient.

Methodologically, the purpose is to innovate the qualitative research method by leveraging cutting-edge technology. To demonstrate this we created a smartphone app with the purpose of data collection; working as a tool to aid in this research. The research aims to highlight ways to expand past traditional ethnography research methodology by borrowing traits from other fields such as IoT, and psychology.

House sharing is a sophisticated and complex phenomenon that includes many diverse aspects. The core of this research will focus on behaviours that occur after moving into a shared house. However, many other aspects could be investigated such as those outlined in this brief mindmap:

Based on the initial deduction and assumption map below, my research is focused on the financial aspects and behaviour change involved in house sharing. The current methods of calculating bills are haphazard and often lead to incorrect calculations. Also, it is uncertain whether people will be influenced when they interact with others in a house-sharing experience.

The three core actors my research focuses on are international students, white-collar workers and middle-man landlords, which represent the most prominent actors in the house-sharing market.

Needs Analysis

Dr Maalsen and I collected qualitative data separately. From my side, participants were invited to interviews sharing their opinions on their house sharing experiences. Each interview took about 1 hour on average and contained intensive and abundant insights.

Ethnography App

Functions

Using the above research we determined App functionality. The app was designed to be used by all members of a particular household.

Enhance
communication & bond

chatting, event creating and sharing, documents storing, images storing.

Avoid face to face finance-related communication

cost recording, bills auto-split, pre-paid planning, online transaction.

Realtime electricity auto-monitoring (scaleable)

lights monitoring, photo-resister sensor connecting, estimated utility cost calculating.

Task sharing (House sharing responsibility)

tasks list, next due reminding, recommended checklists, calendar.

Prototypes & Iterations

There are two rounds of hi-fi prototypes in total. The first round prototype was meant to create contexts and illustrate necessary interfaces, and the second one aimed to be applied for user testing.

The purpose of prototype testing is to help users to be familiar with the App functions and examining the usability simultaneously.

I improved the 1st prototype through self-walkthrough to complete troubleshooting, I then generated user testing tasks based on this to create a detailed testing context, which also helped to refine the granularity of interfaces and ensure the tests work to isolate and answer specific questions that had arisen during the prototyping process.

I designed specific data collection interfaces in order to collect and efficiently display related data.

User Testing & Results Analysis

10 participants in total were invited into the prototype testing phase. In this session, participants were required to follow the task sheet, finish tasks with a Think Aloud method while operating the interactive clickable prototype. In terms of participant selection, only two of them had participated in the previous semi-structured interviews, the others were picked randomly, as long as they had or were currently in a house-sharing living situation.
All participants were asked to give quick feedback after finishing each task and an overall judgement with a post-test questionnaire. The questionnaire involved 20 5-point Likert scale questions and 3 open-ended questions, concentrating on quantitatively assessing levels of prototype usability, functional usefulness, needs achieving and qualitative opinions of their expected excluded functions. The desire and deciding factors that affected the downloading and purchasing of an app were also explored to shed light on marketing opportunities.

Functional Usefulness

The listed functions had achieved a 4.4 usefulness rating on average. Bills-related functions were considered to be the most useful functionality, especially ‘Online transaction’ reached the value of Mean 5 / StDev 0. Functions with a lower score on prototype usability were rated as useful as well, which can be assumed that user experience generated a visible and direct influence on the judgement.

Prototype Usability

In general, the working prototype has a high satisfaction level ( Mean4.5 / StDev 0.5). Participants went through the user flows successfully in an average of 11 minutes. Specifically, among ten functions, 60% of them were rated higher than 4.5, the rating of the functions lower than that had a larger StDev value, which indicates that participants held non-uniform views. Functions #2 and #7 were rated with the lowest scores mainly because of the unsuitable visual design.

Needs Achieving

The app met user expectations in managing bills, splitting responsibility and managing utilities. When asking why users rated enhancing bonds with a lower score, participants claimed that it would be hard to maintain a close relationship when splitting bills too directly.

Overall, according to the comments from participants after user testing, most participants commented that they are willing to use it in their real life. However, it will also depend on whether their housemates reach an agreement on using it.

Outcomes

The overall feedback of the Ethnography App was positive, which confirmed the validity of the supposed needs and predetermined functions. Participants were generally satisfied with the App prototype, especially the financial management features. The conclusion is people are sensitive to expenses associated with house sharing, and they are willing to invest in purchasing and learning a new app to assist in this aspect.

The App was designed to provide a convenient, fair and efficient way to manage bills and split costs and included functionality to promote digital communication and smart living.

Meanwhile, de-familiarisation and re-consideration of current ethnography methods are also new ways to innovate ethnography research. Collecting statistics, audio and visual data with App and IoT solutions can be a feasible method for ethnography research at this stage. The expected long-term data exported from the App enables researchers to analyse them and achieve a behaviour changing mode, which leads to a profound understanding of house sharing. Therefore, digital ethnography is providing ethnography research with more opportunities and possibilities.

In conclusion, my research results indicated that two main aims are fulfilled, and the current outcomes formed a foundation for the 3-year ‘Housing Futures: Smart and Shared?’ project.