Case Study: "Juggle"

This project is a part of UXTerps’s weekly design challenges. I want to share my design thinking process to solve the problem challenge in 7 hours. I have named it "Juggle" due to the idea of juggling multiple responsibilities.

My Role

I led the UX/UI development of this project, as I worked completely individually. I produced user flows, wireframes, and visual mockups for the final prototype. I focused on the experience of the progress monitor, goal setting feature, calendar, and to-do list, since those are the intersection users need for work-life-home balance.

The Challenge

Online learning has made it difficult for young children to remain focused on school, requiring the help of their parents. However, on top of juggling the many responsibilities they have with working from home and taking care of their family, it has become a struggle for parents to balance a healthy work-life with their parental duties.

The Approach

Before jumping into the project’s structure, I started a competitive analysis of other task management and goal centered apps, such as Canvas, Lose It!, Notion, and Apple Calendar, and how they solved the problem of tracking progress of certain duties.

In order to know what solves the problem of managing home, work, and family duties, I needed to identify an experience to integrate with parents’ daily lives, responsibilities, and individual schedules.

The Discovery

During the discovery phase, I created a case study of a family that is trying to schedule different responsibilities throughout the day.

My research revealed that an experience that could handle each responsibility needed to have the ability to:

Create a schedule, calendar, and to-do list
Set weekly goals
Measure progress by how close the user is to reaching their productivity goal

These features work in order to keep up with the multiple duties parents will face throughout the week.

Core Problem

Parents with busy schedules are having a hard time keeping up with their work duties while running a household, especially during a pandemic. Making sure their children’s school performance is to their preference is now a new responsibility added to their plates, since the children do their schooling at home now. The parent may find themselves overwhelmed with all of these responsibilities hitting them at once during an already difficult time.

The Solution

After brainstorming with what I learned from the competitive analysis, the solution I came up with was to separate work, home, and schooling to keep track of each duty in an easily trackable set-up. I prioritized implementing features that assist with all three themes to accomplish the task of managing work and home life, along with children’s academics.

The goal setting feature also allows the user to aim for the completion or partial completion of a task within a chosen timeframe. The home goal feature will give a percentage of how much activity it has taken to reach that completed portion, followed by a total percentage of all productivity. This way, the user may track their progress and level of productivity regarding the goals they have set. For instance, regarding keeping up with their children's academics, the goal

setting feature can indicate how much time the parent spent reviewing school material with their child. Their academic progress is measured through how much time is spent studying with the parent for as long as the parent sets, and tracking how far along until the weekly study goal is hit. The same applied to the Work and Home tabs.

The calendar feature will allow important dates and tasks to be assigned to a different day of the week, complete with indicators of dates set with events and descriptions of the tasks.

The to-do list feature allows the user to list and check off miscellaneous tasks as completed. Checked entries will move to the bottom of the list until deleted.