The Challenge

To-do lists can be overwhelming, particularly if you share a household. I created an app concept that alleviates the stress of the never-ending to-do list by breaking down each task into more manageable sub-tasks. All to-do lists can be shared, so that anyone in the household can take on different sub-tasks in order to get things done more efficiently.

 

The Research

I identified early on that the users for this app will be young, tech-savvy, and too busy to complete the long-term projects they have going on. With those specifications in mind, I spoke to parents of young children and busy professionals who live with roommates or significant others, basically, anyone who needs to collaborate with others to get household chores done.

 

The Findings

The people I interviewed had goals they wanted to get done at some point in the future but felt overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start. Additionally, people living with a spouse/significant other weren’t able to share all of the little tasks that they wanted to accomplish in the future, even when their spouses/significant others could help with those tasks.

No one used a specific app to communicate chores/to-do lists to the people they live with – many people used text messaging (group messages for those living with roommates), and many people I interviewed had personal to-do list apps.

“The reason we think about things is because we don’t trust our systems”

These findings were able to inform my personas:

 

The Personas

I developed two personas that represented our two main audiences; mothers of young children and busy professionals that live with roommates.

The Wireframes

After gathering my notes on user needs and doing research into other list apps and collaborative apps, it was time to sketch and wireframe.

I wanted to create an app that didn’t require onboarding; an app that users could immediately brain dump their projects into and start tackling piece by piece. The target users are already pressed for time, the last thing they need is another useless app. The app should improve the users’ lives through empowering them to accomplish their goals.

With that in mind, I sketched out the basic user flow so I could quickly identify key screens to sketch out next.

From there, I continued to iterate several common use cases for the app, and sketched out the corresponding pages.

Thankfully for everyone, I started building out my wireframes in Axure once I had the UI and the basic interactions sketched out. I built out the app screens one use case at a time, testing and revising the wireframes each time.

 

The Testing

I wanted to start testing early and often, to ensure the experience was intuitive from the beginning. I had test users go through task flows using paper prototypes several times before refining the app screens. Once the major flows were refined I created low-fidelity prototypes in InVision that allowed my test users to go through the app on a mobile device.

The Conclusion

CoNote was a class project for the General Assembly UX course, and unfortunately we didn’t move into design and high-fidelity prototyping as a part of the course. I am continuing to refine the app and am hoping to partner with a developer to turn this project into a tangible app.