Disclaimer: This project summary is de-branded to align with NDA compliance.

[Telcom] Tasks and Rewards Feature

Created an intuitive and low-maintenance task management system to allow parents to track their children’s chore progress and growing independence.

ROLE

User Experience (UX) Designer

TIMELINE

May 2024 to October 2024

TEAM

2 Product Owners, 1 Experience Lead, 1 Engineer, 2 Designers

SKILLS

Comparative Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Cross-team Collaboration, Figma, Prototyping, Wireframing

One of Publicis Sapient’s clients, [Telecom Company], is a well established telecommunications service provider wither numerous, separate, yet connected apps. The client is pursuing an effort to merge family-related apps into one unified app to allow customers to manage family-related items in one place. One of the apps the client aims to merge into the central app is their [Telecom Company] children’s app. Their existing (as of May 2024) children’s app allows parents to assign tasks and rewards to their children.

Though, through research and customer reviews on the Apple App store and Google App store, the client found that [Telecom Company] children’s app customers found the process of assigning tasks in the app confusing and taxing. The app used jargon words that did not reflect how customers label items in day-to-day life. Alongside this realization, the client desires to shift the framing of the existing app from “monitoring your children” to “helping your children gain independence.”

With the goal of resolving customers’ points of friction and releasing a rebranded version of the children’s app into the consolidated ecosystem experience, the client asked my pod on Publicis Sapient team to reimagine and create a new version of the children’s app that will fit into the new central app experience, make the process of assigning chores and giving rewards more intuitive, and support the fostering of independence for customers’ children.

Customers experience friction when trying to customize chore assignments.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM

💭 How might we enable parents to intuitively assign chores in a way that aligns with their everyday language, while aligning with the constraint of matching the overall brand’s identity?

Understand customer expectations of the experience

SCOPING OUT COMPETITORS

I conducted market research using Competitive Analyses to understand the experience customers have on related apps when assigning tasks and giving awards to children. I simulated the actions of assigning tasks on two similar apps: Smores Up and Cozi. Completing this analysis allowed me to visualize how customers expect to assign chores by date, track completion status, and review which child is assigned to a particular chore.

I also conducted Comparative Analyses to understand how out-of-category apps, such as Chick-fil-A app and Bath and Body Works app, create an incentivizing experience that encourages customers to complete required tasks to receive an award and regularly return to the app to review reward progress.

Across all apps analyzed, I took note of their framing, aesthetic choices, features offered, and usability. Keeping these findings in mind throughout the remainder of the design process helped me to align design ideas with expectations customers have built through experiences on other apps. Matching the customers’ mental model reduces the need for customers to endure an unnecessary learning curve for a familiar experience.

DEFINING FEATURE REQUIREMENTS

Identify the steps needed to assign chores and give rewards

After sharing initial market research findings with internal and [Telecom Company] stakeholders, I began to define the requirements for the new version of the app. I focused on answering the question, “What does a customer need to able to accomplish their goal of creating and rewarding chores?”

To identify the steps needed for a customer to successfully assign a chore and reward the completion of the chore, I first drafted a list of the most common tasks customers create on the existing version of the app (provided by client research). I then reflected on the non-digital experience of parents assigning chores to their children. Mapping the digital chore assignment experience to the offline experience of assigning chores, I brainstormed the details needed for each step of the process. I also referenced findings from Competitive Analyses to incorporate additional details customers expect to have in the client’s experience.

Organize the structure of the chores and rewards feature

ORGANIZING THE CONTENT

After defining a draft of core requirements, I explored the organization of the actions and content for the app’s feature.

During this step, I referenced the structure of the client’s other internal apps to ensure I continue to design with internal brand consistency. Across multiple of the client’s apps that were recently integrated into the client’s central app, I noticed each contained a dashboard that elevated “Quick Actions” for the customer, followed by other actions available for the user.

For the client’s task and reward assignment feature, I explored multiple structures. After collaborating with my pod’s Design Lead and one of the Product Owners, I decided on the Information Architecture (IA) below which reflects a layout that aligns the brand’s other apps and categorizes chore assignment, chore management, reward assignment, and reward management in a way that customers expect, supported by earlier market research.

UNDERSTANDING THE CUSTOMER

Map the flow of steps customers will take to assign a task and to complete a task.

With the Information Architecture (IA) at front of mind, I created a User Flow diagram to visualize the process of parents navigating the proposed IA to assign a task, and children completing an assigned task.

Explore the structure of assigning chores

BRAINSTORMING THE STRUCTURE

After defining a draft of core requirements and exploring the steps customers will take, I began drafting the structure of creating a task and creating a reward.

Considering the client wishes to integrate this experience into an app that merges multiple of the brand’s apps, I analyzed the components used in the client’s other apps so that I could design with internal consistency. I noticed [Telecom Company] frequently uses accordions on pages with multiple steps, or stacks input fields. I explored both variations and presented initial drafts to my internal team.

Apply feedback and continue to explore.

ITERATING THE DESIGN

After sharing initial wireframes with the team, we collectively agreed on pursuing the version without accordions. Taking into consideration the goal of the customer (Assign a task with minimal friction) while keeping their lifestyle in mind (busy, limited free time), I concluded that hiding key actions behind clicks would negatively impact parents’ ability to easily and quickly assign tasks. Therefore, ensuring the visibility actions by default reduced friction in the task creation and reward creation flows.

I iterated the direction of the design, further exploring the components needed to create a detailed task. I incorporated the concept of “predictive text” that allows customers to begin typing in an input field and receive matches based on their input. This implementation reduces the level of effort required by the customer to create a task, yet maintaining the same outcome of assigning a task to their child.

Finalize the design.

HANDING-OFF FINAL DESIGNS

After reviewing the refined designs with my internal pod, I presented updates to [Telecom Company] stakeholders. I received a technical constraint from the client’s engineering team - dev is not able to support the rewards portion of the app at this time.

In addition to reflecting the development constraint in the design, I revisited the length of the experience with the intent of identifying additional opportunities to better address the customers’ need of creating tasks in a straightforward, understandable manner. I explored the idea of reducing the multi-page task creation process to a single-page setup that allows customer to prioritize one task at a time in one view, making the process quicker and more straightforward.

After multiple iterations, I landed on the final designs which received approval from client stakeholders. I handed-off designs to the engineering team for production.

I successfully design a re-branded version of [Telecom Company] children’s app. I was able to:

  • Simplify the chore creation flow.

  • Create an intuitive experience that aligns with real-world behaviors and language.

  • Align with [Telecom Company]’s existing internal branding.