Errands 2.0 
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My role & responsibilities – UX Research, UX Design, UI Design
Timeline – Ten weeks.
Context – When it comes to running a household, I have found there are generally three types of moms:
– Those that run all of the errands.
– Those that split the errands with their spouse.
– Those that have their spouse run all the errands.

I decided to focus on creating a solution for moms who run all of the errands for their household, have at least one child, and are between 24 – 37 years old.

first

The problem

How can I better organize all the errands that I have to run?

There are countless to-do apps in existence, but none seem to answer the questions, “Where should I start?” and “Where do I go next?” I decided that my solution would address these problems.

Second

The process

I decided to follow IDEO’s Human-Centered Design process for this project. The three main phases are inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Since this project had to be completed in ten weeks, I spent about three weeks per phase.

The Inspiration Phase is about trying to understand your users. I prepared a discussion guide and interviewed three young moms between the ages of 24 – 37 about what activities they are involved in, what activities their children are involved in, and what technology they use in the home. I also did a benchmark analysis of the top five family-related to-do apps on the market.

In order to remain focused on designing for moms and not myself, I created a provisional persona. Samantha was based on online research and moms that I know within my circle of friends and family. 

 

The Ideation Phase is about making sense of what you heard, generating ideas, identifying opportunities for design, and testing and refining solutions. I wrote the insights from the interviews onto sticky notes (one insight per sticky) and then created an affinity map.

Some key findings:

– Moms spend more time outside of the home than they do inside. One mom that I interviewed said her kids have activities 4 out of 7 days of the week.

– All have iPhones and use notifications to remind them of upcoming appointments, activities, etc. 

– When it comes to running errands, moms try to consolidate as much as possible. For example, moms will choose a particular basketball team for their son to play on based on if there is a library at the school where they can take their other kids. 

Based on my research, I began to sketch out some wireframes as to how I envisioned ERRANDS 2.0. After several iterations, I began to realize how I wanted the app to look like and created a hi-fidelity, interactive prototype. This prototype was then used in three usability tests.

 

The Implementation Phase is about bringing your solution to life. This phase also consists of constant iteration. After the usability tests, I incorporated the feedback into the next version of the prototype. For example, Rachel couldn’t find a way to delete itineraries and wanted to associate tasks with certain times. The flow shown above is what I modified to make both of those tasks possible. 

 

Designing a product or service is an iterative process. After receiving feedback, I decided to prioritize several features and create the above product roadmap.

Now = 6 months
Next = 12 months
Later = 18 months

If you are interested in hearing more about the lessons learned from this project, check out my blog post “What Moms Taught Me About UX”. 

 
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