​Designing an intuitive mobile application to organize family chores and get kids excited about doing housework
2021
Overview & Problem Statement
Personal project for a mobile application that will be submitted to the Apple App Store. The goal of Chore-Wheel is to automate the chore-assignment process in a household to take the burden away from the parents. Once the chores and rewards are set in the application, the parents can step back and let Chore-Wheel assign them to the rest of the household.
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Parents have enough on their hands without having to worry about who does what chores when. Kids tend to react poorly to the word “chore” and Chore-Wheel aims to make chores a fun activity that gives them a sense of independence and accomplishment.
Users & Audience
Users include family households as well as people living with roommates. This app will primarily be used on mobile and, in some cases, on a tablet or iPad.
Roles & Responsibilities
I was the sole designer on this project. My responsibilities included market research, design, prototyping, hiring a developer, facilitating handoff of the design to the developer, overseeing the development of the application, and user testing once the development was completed.
SCOpe & COnstraints
We had a limited budget, so I did the design work on my own time and found a colleague who was willing to become a partner in exchange for the development work. Time constraints included having to communicate over video calls in two different time zones.
Process
I started by thinking about what my household would need in an application like this, the different chores, the frequency of spins, whether a chat was necessary, and how the chores and rewards would be structured. I grew up in a family that makes a competition out of everything so the leaderboard was a necessary feature.
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Next, I chose the color palette which I opted to do in a “dark mode” style with simple accent colors. I knew that the wheel would have to be brightly colored and didn’t want to take away from that in the design. I initially made the background color a dark blue but quickly realized that it was not the right color and made the appropriate adjustments.
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After that, I did a simple wireframe on paper to ensure that I had all of the pages and features that I wanted mapped out. I then converted this to a Figma wireframe to make it more accessible to my developer for scoping and quoting.
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Once I had suggestions back from my developer, I started designing in Sketch, exporting everything to InVision using the Craft plugin as I went along so that the developer could have access to the designs and give feedback where it was necessary.
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We did have to make some minor adjustments to make the application easier to code, but no major changes to the initial features or pages.
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After two full rounds of revisions, we had a design that we were happy with and I started the handoff to the developer.
Outcomes & Results
I am very happy with the final product that we were able to deliver.
I learned a lot about handoff and how to design with the backend in mind. I also learned that it’s okay to completely change the design midway through and not to get too attached to any one version of the thing that I am designing.
Overall, I think that the process was efficient and having the ability to get feedback and comments through the InVision platform as I worked was incredibly helpful.
*Full prototype here.
**Please note that InVision does not have an iPhone 11 skin and this version of the design was made with the iPhone 11 in mind.
