What can UX do for equal sharing of responsibilities? (II)
Bringing working collaboration tools home
The ideation phase gave way to prototyping, an essential step in the Design Thinking process.
Neat: For Your Peace of Mind is a Task Management App, specially designed for families or couples who want to abandon the old paradigm of sharing responsibilities
Neat incorporates Artificial Intelligence to free women from planning tasks and liberate all family members from entering tasks manually. So improvisation and changing planes fit seamlessly into our home and caregiving workflow.
Neat means: “in pleasingly orderly and clean condition”, and “cleverly effective”. In slang terms: wonderful, fine, or something impressive and amazing.
What is more amazing than an app that reduces the mental load and mental strain from our lives?
The app works similarly to workflow tools, distributing household chores among the couple/family members aided by the AI, which transcripts the user´s conversations, creates task lists, and saves the tasks within each appropriate folder.
No time consuming. No repeated patterns. Dynamic.
Prototyping
My first step was to outline some Low-fi wireframes to work on.
As our target audience is families, specifically women, I chose to reflect that in the election of the colours and the app´s typography.
I chose green as a primary colour as it transmits peace, health, safety, stability and balance.
The secondary colour election was peachy pink, which socially communicates femininity, gentleness, friendship and tenderness.
Families are diverse and made up of diverse people. Therefore, accessibility and Inclusive Design should be part of our approach as user-centred designers. Our app intends to be used by every member of the family.
To introduce Inclusive Design in our product and meet the main fundaments of WCAG, I choose Atkinson Hyperlegible typography which increases character recognition, ultimately improving readability.
I realized contrast tests in every component and text, so Neat is adapted to reach the WCAG levels of AA and AA compliance.
The neat logo uses Pacifico Typography and Comfortaa. I degraded the colour of the primary colours to create a cohesive message along the product.
Login Page and Profiles
The design is minimalist to avoid cognitive load.
On the other hand, an Artificial Intelligence Assistant helps couples to keep an informal conversation and transcript their dialogue. Organises meetings, tasks, and doctor appointments, and it incorporates all that into their personal folders, calendars and To-Do lists.
Lastly, the user can check their Calendar section and scroll to find out what tasks and appointments has every day.
What Neat achieves and why?
Neat accomplished the main needs detected along the research: it helps the equal tasks sharing due the AI realizes that share automatically, and differently in each occasion.
In this manner, we avoid the users repeating the same tasks and take care of the same responsibilities time after time.
We free female users from planning or entering the tasks themselves.
Moreover, Neat is a versatile tool which can make quick and simple changes, adapted to the modern society in which every minute of our day is a precious commodity.
Future Developments
In further research, I want to understand if non-heteronormative couples work under the same paradigm. And to learn if the distribution of tasks and planning entails the same difficulties.
And why not? To research with children and youth. What do they observe? Is technology able to educate children to create more equal households?
On the design iterations, testing is on the way. An iterative design approach will bring user feedback to ensure the app requirements meet user needs.
After all the Design Thinking process, we can affirm User Experience Design can contribute to a more equalitarian society.
What do you think?
Thanks for reading! 🤓
