Designing Checky

Checky is a checklist app designed to help you share your to-do lists, create events, and share responsibilities with others.

Introduction

With our busy lives, we usually fail to remember many simple everyday things, we rely on people or apps to remind us of them and stay on track. That’s the reason we use reminders, to-do lists, grocery shopping apps, etc.

With this in mind, the team I was hired by, wanted to create a product that would help users not only with their errands but also with tasks they do with other people, like planning meetups, picnics, or birthdays.

To enter a startup competition, get funded, and continue working on the idea, a team of young developers teamed up with me, and together, we designed Checky.

Initial research

User interviews

To understand our target audience and uncover problems occurring in their daily lives, we conducted 15 initial interviews discussing planning events and meet-ups with them. We asked participants to walk us through their process of planning these gatherings, the tools, and the challenges they are facing in the process.

Direct Quotes

“It usually becomes a mess in the group chats and somebody has to control everybody”

“It is frustrating to come home and realize to forgot the most important thing to wanted to buy”

“It is hard to remember everything everyone writes in the groupchats”

“It becomes a huge headache making sure everybody did their part”

“I have multiple groupchats for multiple friend groups, it is hard to keep track of everything I need to do, gatherings and events cause chaos for me”

The Survey

To understand how relevant problems discovered during interviews were, we created a survey focusing on:

1. Understanding what tools people use to keep up with everyday tasks outside of their work life and how efficient these tools are;
2. Exploring ways of planning and keeping track of personal events, friend gatherings, and meetups.

It turned out that the majority of survey participants relied on their devices to remind them of tasks daily, for sharing and communicating they mostly used messaging apps. As for planning events and meetups with friends, the majority planned them weekly and also used messaging apps of their choice.

Main pain points using messaging apps to communicate tasks:

• Inability to track the progress of the tasks;
• Making changes requires further communication;
• Need to set reminders separately;

Main pain points using messaging apps to plan events with friends:

• Important information gets lost in the chat;
• Confusion on what is assigned to whom;
• Inability to track the progress of the tasks;

Workshop

We analyzed research findings with an affinity diagramming workshop: created sticky note collections on the Miro board, sorted the notes into categories, and voted for the most important problems we needed to address.

Problems we prioritized:

• Users had a hard time tracking the progress of the shared task
• It was hard to stay organized and on track while dealing with more than 2 people
• Users could not keep track of what was assigned to whom, which usually caused confusion

After that, to have a better understanding of our users as a team we did a separate workshop for deriving personas based on our research insights from interviews and surveys. As a result of the workshop, we were able to create 3 personas, that portrayed the majority of our potential users.

Ideation and feature prioritization

After gaining insights from initial research, the team could understand what type of users we were designing for and pinpoint their goals and pains.

We conducted ideation workshops where each of the members visualized how the user experiences the app and came up with feature ideas. We encouraged all ideas, prioritized them on the matrix, and decided what we could and wanted to do for the MVP. We also created a backlog with other good ideas to do after the initial launch of the app.

During the ideation process, I created storyboards to visualize how and when will our users interact with the product.

In this example, you can see how Megan (our persona) creates a shopping list in the morning, goes to the market before work (Megan works from home), and buys things she wants for the day.

She couldn't buy several things, therefore updated the shopping list, and shared it with her husband to buy them on the way home. As the husband buys things from the shopping list, Megan receives notifications and is very satisfied knowing that all the items are checked off of her list.

User & task flows

After ideating and coming up with the main functions, we created user flows that focus on how the target audience interacts with the product.

To understand how easy our main tasks were to accomplish, we created Task flows for our 3 main tasks: Creating a shared list — The first thing users do after registration; Creating events with friends — including inviting friends to the event and finally, adding new people to their friend list in the app.

Creating Task flows helped us visualize the steps needed to accomplish a specific task and determine what key pages need to be designed. By visualizing steps that need to be taken to reach the main goals of the product, you can start thinking about optimizing the bottleneck tasks and know which tasks could be simplified.

Sketching the app

Starting with iPad sketches help me avoid blank Figma canvas. Starting with paper or tablet sketching makes me feel more hands-on, and boosts my creativity, and willingness to experiment.

Drawing very low-fidelity basic sketches helps me consider problems from many angles and generate multiple solutions quickly. Here are some of my final sketches, which were reviewed and modified with the team

Wireframing

After forming the basic vision for the solutions, I usually don’t move into mid-fidelity wireframing. At that point, I already have my basic styles down and I do wireframes with an initial style guide. That way clients usually understand it better and don’t ask questions regarding the “black and white” color scheme.

In general, wireframing focuses on the content and functionality rather than colors or refined visuals, they can be interactive and can be used for usability testing.

In this case, we as a team were still unsure about the visual direction, so we wanted to test out the black-and-white app, see how it feels, run some usability tests, and focus solely on the interaction.

Some of the final visuals

Onboarding visuals are the first screens the user sees before starting to use the product. It is helpful to make onboarding screens colorful, eye-catching, and very useful at the same time. Information provided on these screens gives users a sense of what to expect in the app.

Upon entering the app, the user is encouraged to create their first list instantly by typing items on the list. The list can be shared with a friend and you both will be able to add, edit, and check off items from the list.

Events are lists that combine multiple categories and can be assigned to multiple friends. Each person can see the category they’ve been assigned to and can manage tasks in their categories. To assign friends user needs to add a category or choose the existing one, choose “assign to” and search for friends from the list.

To add a new event user specifies a name and a category for the event, invites people to it, and finally, shares the event with people outside the app by copying a shareable link.

After finishing up the designs, I helped the team prepare a product showcase presentation for the competition and created simple prototypes to bring it to life. As a result, the team was able to secure initial funding and start working on developing the MVP.

Thank you for reading 🚀🙏