The Product and Background
ChoreShare is a house chore management product sharable with household members. Allowing the users to create a task list and manage it with their household members helps everyone get involved and become more responsible. It enables the user to assign each task based on the individual member's schedule and sends a smart reminder never to miss their tasks.
I was assumed to be approached by an investor; who believes a big market is out there for a house chore management tool (including all kinds of chores such as cleaning, laundry, preparing meals, or grocery shopping). The investor would like to create an app to help people with that. My role was to convince the investor that it would be best to better understand the users' pain points and build empathy with the household members to determine their primary demand.
The Challenge
Create a user flow with wireframes, and deliver some mockup screens.
Design a landing page to introduce the product to its potential users. While the users are visiting the website, they should understand how the product could help them with their current problem.
During the design process, researches should be done by following the research plan, which also needs to be prepared to understand and empathize with the users and market.
With research results and takeaways, develop the concepts and idea from scratch and eventually put everything together for the final design solution—wireframes, mockups, and a landing page.
WHAT I DID
Storytelling (including the backstory), research, analysis, concept & idea developing, sketching, prototyping, UX/UI design
TOOLS
Sketch, Principle, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator
TIMELINE
4 weeks (one week on the design solution)
Research Plan
My first step was to create a research plan to show how you would conduct this research to gain these insights. To get started, I needed to identify who I am targeting initially, what the best research methods are, and my key areas of inquiry (what are the main things I’m looking to learn about from the users?). Framing the research plan helped me structure the approach to understand the opportunities in the targeting market.
PERSONA
Empathy Map
To understand and empathize better with the user, I created an empathy map of potential users' emotional states. I interviewed two family members of a husband and a wife with two kids who live in the Midwest suburban area. I fill out the empathy map based on the interview over the phone call. The majority of our conversation focused on how their family and themselves take care of house chores and manage everyday routine.
Storyboard
I tried to focus on details that happened to David's family (persona) while trying to achieve their goal.
The story below shows how they solve their problem without any help from the future product to find out current situations and problems more in detail.
FRAMING THE PROBLEM
Brainstorm
I reframed the design problem by Point of View statements (POV statements) to expand thinking and gain a clearer insight into the users' real pain points. I looked to industry thought leaders IDEO to learn their philosophy on 'How Might We' statements' and focused on three main elements: The User, Need, and Insight.
And Based on the previous research with those 'How Might We' statements that I've generated, I sketched out potential solutions. I ended up picking four HMW questions that I liked most and imagined solutions regardless of limitations or resources.
Competitive Analysis
I observed and tested other products that help users to manage their house chores. None of them offers both chore do-to lists blending into the user’s daily routine and progress monitoring at once.
Userflow
Based on the brainstorming exercise and the storyboard, I created storytelling imagined the persona using the product to manage his/her house chores. From the brainstorm exercise, I picked the following solutions as key features delivered by the product;
Monitor multiple chore progress at once.
Make small chores and tasks automatically blend into users' daily routine.
Provide smart reminders and alarms to help users keep on track.
Price each chore based on the amount of the work and let users get paid when they complete jobs.
Add an easy communication channel to help users discuss or reschedule their plans.
Product Mockup & Landing Page
After gathering research data, gleaning insights, and articulating the problems, I synthesized insights and ideas into a landing page describing a product with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) set of features.
I began with writing a featured list and about the product. Focusing on making the product's concept and feature set straightforward and easy to understand, I created a landing page by building a grid system, adding photos and writings in places.