Tools
Figma
Descriptors
UI/UX Design, UX Research, Personas, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability testing
Project Context
During Spring semester of my Junior year, I decided I needed more projects that showed off my UI/UX research and design skills. I specifically wanted to get more experience in Figma as well. During previous semesters, my dad and I had been talking about developing a chore management app for families to use and I decided to start building out parts of that concept while also developing my skills further.
Problem
Parents often struggle to get their kids to take part in household chores and/or remember to do them. Kids often don't see a point in doing these chores when they don't necessarily get anything out of it.
Solution
Building out an app that allowed parents to put all of the household chores in one place while also providing prizes to their children as an incentive to complete tasks both assigned to them and not assigned to them.
Initial Meeting
Because of how this project was done as a part of a project I plan on working on further in the future. I started by having an initial meeting with my dad to understand the goals and hopes he had for this project. During this meeting I learned a few key things to keep in mind:
Building out the parts about setting up tasks and setting up rewards were most important.
Keeping a generally clean and simple look also allowed the app to be built out for more than just families in the future.
The homepage should have all of the most prominent things right there.
Creating a Persona
Following the initial meeting with my dad, I then created two user personas based on how there would be two main users for this app, the parent and the child. A lot of the information within these personas were based on information I already knew about my own family members and notes from the initial meeting.
Three design tenets were also created for each of the user personas, along with more descriptive bullets for each tenet. Not all of these tenets were used while these specific workflows were added, but were still written for the general app as a whole.
Parent Design Tenets:
Having everything in one place simplifies the process:
Being able to look at all of the tasks they have for the household within a calendar/schedule is vital and makes their life simpler.
Setting up tasks or editing them should be a pretty quick and simple process, much faster than fixing a physical calendar.
Current tasks should be visible and future tasks should be easy to find:
The home page should have all of the tasks for each specific kid directly visible within the app automatically.
There should be a schedule/calendar where future tasks can be viewed and kids can pick up tasks not directly assigned to them.
A system that takes some of the work of my plate is vital:
Reminders for children allows parents to not have to be the constant reminder
Having all of the tasks organized within the app means parents don't have to keep a physical calendar and spend the longer period of time updating it.
Providing rewards for children motivates them to keep doing their work and takes some of the parents workload by already having incentive for the kids available whenever.
Child Design Tenets:
I don't want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do:
Tasks should be directly within the first page of the app and self explanatory of what they have to do and when they should complete it by.
Getting something in exchange for what I'm doing would encourage me to complete it:
Tasks should clearly state that there is some sort of reward for completing tasks
Tasks that aren't directly assigned to anyone should offer bonuses to encourage picking them up
They should be able to look at all of the reward options available to them.
Reminders of what I have to do should include incentive and/or not be nagging:
Reminders of chores shouldn't be large, wordy popups that happen often.
Including the reward for chores/tasks encourages a child to look at it more.
Workflow Sketches
After creating the personas and design tenets, two workflows were developed for each persona. They both included one workflow that focused on the task aspect of the app while the other workflow focused on the reward aspect.
Lo-Fi & Hi-Fi Workflows
Following the workflow sketches on paper, I created my lo-fi workflows within Figma. These workflows included the very rough shapes of everything within the app, although I did work on designing the more final navigation icons during this process as well.
After creating the lo-fi workflows, I started working on turning everything into hi-fidelity workflows. Given the goal of trying to keep the app relatively clean and simple, this included mostly adding in simple colors and making certain visual elements stand out more, like the coin icons in particular.
Usability Testing and Iterating
Following the creation of the hi-fi workflows, I created a usability testing script, two different variations that covered the parent tasks or the kid tasks. I then tested with one person for each usability script, so two tests in total, with participants that were close to the user personas.
I used the notes and quotes from the usability tests to make changes to each of the workflows, making sure to attach specific quotes to the changes that were made.
Finalized Prototype
After I made changes to each workflow with comments attached, I took all of the finalized frames and connected them together in prototype mode within Figma. I did this for both the parent frames and the child frames, generally linking the prototypes to follow the same path as the user testing script.
Conclusion
One major thing that I learned from this project that I wasn't entirely expecting was how important it is to get consistent feedback when creating an app design like this. During user testing I got a lot of great feedback surrounding aspects of the app design that I could currently change but also ideas for other aspects of the app as it was built out further. A lot of these things were aspects that I hadn't thought of myself at all and it really showed how each person gives a unique perspective and getting those perspectives are what makes a design user centered.