KeepUp — A Family Friendly Interface

When tasked with a big project like building an interface for a family I like to lay-out the problem and how I plan on solving the issue.

When tasked with building an interface that is family-friendly, there are a lot of things that need to be accounted for. Who’s going to be using this product? Most likely an age group from the range of 5–60+ which creates a problem, how can we cater this app to a wide range of age groups? Why would kids want to use this app? Are there things that we can implement into this app that could encourage kids to take part in helping out with chores, making dinner, or creating grocery lists? Where is this interface going to be? How can I mold the design and the necessary features into this app without making it difficult to use? I’ll talk about how I thought through these problems and where I directed my attention when creating this design.

Simplicity

While creating this app, I needed to look for inspiration on what designs other apps have used to cater to a wide range of age groups. What apps cater to a wide range of people already, how can I incorporate those features into this design?

Life360 and Spotify are used by families and have an easy to understand interface. How do they do this?

The first thing that I noticed with their app is the navbar at the bottom of the screen, it’s easy to use and creates easy wayfinding when navigating through the app. So I incorporated those aspects into this design. This design will be on a fridge but for the sake of the design I will be keeping it on a phone. These are also the different types of sketches that I came up with to get to this point.

I also, created a hamburger menu on the top left, to create that space of familiarity for the users. The icons represent the different features that come in this app:

Family

you can keep track of each member of the family and see what events and different tasks that they still need to work on. I also included a status bar. The reason why I did that is that it creates a more competitive and fun environment between the people that are assigned tasks, in this case, siblings. Perhaps, the parents can find a way to incentivize the kids in their family.

Groceries (Avocado)

To convey the message of groceries, this is the spot where the person creating the grocery list can add or remove items and create a more customizable list to always ensure that it’s being kept track of.

Meals

And the chef hat to convey the presence of cooking, creating meal plans for the family and adding a feature that recommends popular items, 30-minute dinners, and meal prepping.

There are so many things on this app that I could work on to improve and make easily accessible but so little time. So I decided to focus on one thing that I could make look good and convey the vision that I was thinking of when I was first tasked with this project.

Quick Add

The reason I chose to work on this specific aspect of the app is that it could make things easier for the user if they have one spot to directly create a task, grocery, list, or chore. By doing this you can also quickly delegate who it goes to and add items to your grocery list as well. You will first be directed to your create task page.

Among choosing which task you’d like to add you can easily go through how what tasks you’d like to create and who you’d like to assign this task to.

You can add a grocery list and assign it to someone to buy those specific items. You can also create a chore list and assign that as well. And lastly, you can create a meal plan by simply choosing which meal plan you’d like and adding the ingredients to a grocery list.

Still much more to do!

I hope by taking you through these steps I’ve presented my thought process and how I like to approach certain designs. Although, kind of frustrating I still had a lot of fun with this app and hope to work on something like this long term and see it come to fruition!