- Challenge: Design a sortable list view for a scheduler app to help single parents
- Difficulty level: Easy
- Time to solve the challenge: 15 minutes
- Assumption: Here the single parent is a mom sorting her tasks for the day
This one I was unable to finish within 15 minutes and took 40 instead. I was trying to think about the different options a single parent could sort from and yeah, it just took some more time! 🙂
Thoughts behind the design
There are so many things users (in this case single parents) need to manage. For the sake of this challenge, I focused on designing a sortable list view for the to-do tasks.
For the to-do tasks, few things I considered here were:
- The tasks by default would only show the ones needed to be completed for the day.
- Users can sort the tasks by priority or by time. Many users allocate a time for tasks that needs to be done but sometimes users allocate the priority level for tasks but don’t allocate a time for it. And so this sorting will take that into consideration.
- Order of priority will be color coded, where RED indicates top priority, YELLOW indicates next level priority, and BLUE least priority. The default will be high priority to low priority.
- Sort by time will by default sort starting from morning till end of day.
Design v.1
FLOW
Select Mom (if she’s the user) –> select Tasks –> sort by day –> sort by priority (high to low)
Since we’re at lockdown, I was able to show this design to my husband and get his feedback. I added his comments on post-its.
Main points were:
- Screen 2: tasks should say ‘tasks for the day.’ We don’t need to sort by day, week or month (that was my initial idea), as calendar can take care of that. So let tasks be default as to show only for the day.
- Screen 3: Not needed then. Those are better as filters and not sorting list.
- Screen 4: Initial design was to sort by: Time, Priority (high to low), Priority (low to high). The feedback was users generally want to see in the list starting with top priority. So that should be default.
- Note: Screen 4 and 5 show the tasks which has NA under the time. Screen 5 picks up those tasks as well, when you sort based on priority.
- Screen 5: The time will be sorted by default (I forgot the post-it!)
Iterated design
References
I read a little on some good coparenting apps (here’s the link). I quite liked The Family Core and have taken inspiration for my design!