The making of Kitchen Wall — A to-do list for families 📲
Roughly a year ago I was talking to my friend Patrick about the need to build an app for our portfolio. We were both doing freelance consulting on the same projects and considering the idea that we should create a “digital studio” and formalize our relationship.
Between the two of us we had no shortage of app ideas to work on but we didn’t have anything public to point to that was just ours. The criteria was that our next project would have to be something the two of us could feasibly complete within our “side hustle time” and it had to be something that we would use on a daily basis.
Kitchen Wall was one of Patrick’s ideas. It sounded simple and I liked the concept too. What attracted me initially was that I thought it was something we could complete in the following two months. I also liked the idea of having an app that our families could use too.
Thus, an app concept was born. At that time, this was suppose to be a simple demonstration of our capabilities. Patrick immediately started putting designs together in Keynote and I started coding. It was exciting times embarking on a new project!
💡 Evolution of an idea
We honed the concept down to the bare essentials so we could focus on the foundation and get this app out quickly. That first design didn’t even support multiple lists. It literally was just like your kitchen wall in which only one list exists but anyone in the family can drop notes on it.
Notice that version 2 added support for multiple walls. In practice, having only one wall was just too constraining. We felt that it wasn’t going to be a “viable” product and our personalities just wouldn’t let us build something that was going to be a toy app. We were starting to get emersed in the problem space and for the first time started believing that our two families could get some value out of this. If we found it truly valuable there were probably a lot of other families that would too.
The next big adjustment came from Kerri. Do you remember that scene in The Social Network where Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), dramatically dropped the word “The” from “The Facebook” as he walked away from the dinner table with Mark Zuckerberg?
Yeah, so we had a similar moment when my wife, Kerri, dropped this feedback on us:
“It should be a chalk board. Chalk boards are trendy.” — as she gracefully slipped away to take care of a bunch of actual stuff on her list
At this point, I remember thinking that our wives were likely the real target audience for this app and that we needed to listen and take their feedback seriously. Women are amazing and they juggle so much every day. They are the task masters of most households.
We also knew that women will use technology and share it with their friends if it’s actually making their lives better. With no budget for marketing, word-of-mouth is going to be a huge part of how we find new users. We definitely wanted something that men and women could use but the idea that we needed to first appeal to the woman started to solidify.
That first chalkboard background felt like a new and interesting direction but having pure white text on a chalkboard didn’t feel right. Patrick went out and found a bunch of fonts that could look like chalk but were also tasteful. What is interesting at this point is that Patrick had abandoned his initial desire to produce a “native iOS 10 design” in the spirit of “designing for your audience”.
😞 A 3-step wizard to add a note?
To be clear, this looked great at the design stage and is similar to how many other apps do it. It worked great entering test data and it was easy to implement it this way too. It just fell apart during actual usage by real people.
Kerri and Kelli had it installed and we began to get feedback from extended family as well. The first insight we learned was that entering a long list (specifically groceries) was too slow. Not for any technical reason but because you had to tap too many times. A little detail like is a deal-breaker for that busy person just looking to get stuff done.
We also weren’t liking the extra details we were displaying to the user. We showed who created the note and also who checked it off the list. It was causing us to have to space out the notes so that only 5 or 6 were visible on the screen at once. In the design, with mock data, this looked ok but in practice we would see a lot of redundant information as the same user would often add 10 items at once.
This was around Thanksgiving and we decided to hold off on shipping the app because it didn’t feel right. It wasn’t ready! It was hard to accept postponing the launch after putting so much time and effort into the project.
In the end, we concluded that you don’t need 1,000 people to tell you the same thing that 2 people already told you. This was a key insight we had about getting user feedback. In the early stages of a product it only takes a handful of people to reveal what, in hindsight, seems obvious.
We had to simplify everything. The lists were too heavy, too burdened with detail we didn’t need, and too slow to enter lots of notes.
The new “Simple” Kitchen Wall UX
This new UX allows you to type a note directly on the list, tap return, and the item drops right onto the list. You can enter items as fast as you can type without waiting for needless animations to play. It was a lot more difficult to get this to work in the code but the time spent here made all the difference.
🥓 Stripped down to just what adds value, but now what?
After updating the app to this new UI we knew we were heading in the right direction but something was still missing. When we removed the teal color and went with White chalk only, the lists began to look very plain. And it no longer made sense why all list titles were orange.
Our product was feeling very minimal. Too minimal now. We were seeing a bunch of use cases to add features like priority, colored labels, assigning tasks, setting due dates, etc. However, we didn’t want to fall into the trap of becoming a feature factory but we also had to recognize there is a genuine need for some of these features too.
We will add many more features to this app but we are going to do it slowly, with caution, and intelligently. We see so many products add too many features in the wrong way and a wonderfully simple concept of a “list” turns into a bloated monster that ends up managing you instead of you managing it.
🌈 A Splash of Color + Emoji
Sticking with the chalk board theme, we came up with the idea of letting users have more than one color of chalk. As soon as we added this we knew it was the right direction to go.
Color is the perfect tool because it’s versatile and actually makes the lists look more attractive. It’s a rare win-win. It also allows for a bunch of use cases without adding any weight to the experience. For example:
- Red|Orange|Yellow can represent High|Medium|Low priority
- Blue|Pink can represent Boy|Girl or Husband|Wife for assignment
- All the colors work well for grocery lists, but especially Green
Finally, when you add emoji it starts to look very playful and fun. The experience is still very light which allows a young kid or a grand mother to engage as well. This is why we postition the product as something the whole family will actually use.
🚀 We’ve shipped 1.0!
Finally, after several rounds of tweaks and polish we’ve shipped our 1.0 “MVP” for public use. We now have a solid foundation to build on. Our mission is to become the #1 family productivity app on the App Store. We will only accomplish that mission if we actually help families feel more organized, connected, and productive together.
👉🏼 Download the app 👈🏼 today and leave us some feedback.
P.S. — Breaking news! All the time and effort to make the foundation right is already paying off. We received our first 5-star review on the app store from a total stranger and we couldn’t have expressed it better ourselves!
