As in most partnerships, my husband and I constantly over or underestimate what portion of our joint tasks we are each doing. We developed a system to balance our joint housework and other tasks that worked for us like nothing had, and decided we needed to design and build the app.
A two person project, my role is all things design, product, & QA.
The overall goal of Tally to help couples and housemates share joint work consciously and equitably, and decrease the user's metal load.
The system was developed in many conversations and trials with paper. To prove the concept, we created a month of tasks, and printed and laminated a sheet for each week. Anything that occurred less frequently than every month had to be added on with a dry erase marker, as did any one-off tasks, which got to be tedious.
With our learnings on the system, and after talking to friends and family, I began a ideation process, where sketching led to wireframes.
Tally's onboarding for is especially important for long-term adoption. We didn’t just want to create a system for sharing tasks, but also an app that offloaded the mental load of the tasks that need to be done. Users will inherently need to set up some of their own custom tasks, but smart defaults based on simple user inputs can get users engaged through the questions, and set them up with enough tasks to see value in using the app right away.
Using userinterviews.com, I let users interact with this prototype of rough designs.
Overall the users wanted to use the app. Some concepts were really working (time values, distributing housework), but for some the tasks were overwhelming when shown, and % distribution didn't immediately make sense to everyone.
Before starting on visual design, I wanted to clarify our brand. I first determined brand attributes (with my team of two) and created visual studies based on the attributes. We decided what felt right was Clarifying with a bit of Clever/Fresh.
Leveraging my branding work, I began visually designing the app in detail with interactions. These are a few of the app designs, plus a prototype (to come).
