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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
