Service Introduction
Personal Assistant for Working Moms
Yohana is a personal assistant service that helps working moms tackle everything on their ever-growing to-do lists. I joined the startup, which is funded by Panasonic, a few months after its founding and was able to contribute from the initial service design stages to our post-launch service and app improvements.
My Role
Product Design
As a product/UX designer on the Member App team, I helped shape our member experience - from blueprinting and competitive analysis to Figma prototyping, usability testing, feature design, and building components for our design system.
I contributed to the creation of our initial service blueprint, which helped drive cross-functional and leadership alignment before any of the touchpoints were designed
Selected project
App Navigation Improvements
Post-launch, I led prototyping and visual design for an iterative, comprehensive usability study that laid the foundation for several new features and improvements. Informed by the results of this usability study, I later designed, handed off, and shipped navigation improvements for the company’s member-facing mobile app.
Usability testing prototype that I built in Figma for this study
This study yielded two main insights. Users were frustrated about having to tap an icon on the existing home page, which had no clear function, to get to their to-do list page.
In addition, we had designed the app based on the hypothesis that chatting with the assistant would be more important than referring to the to-do list, but after launch discovered that chat was not an efficient enough mode of interaction. As we added new features such as structured to-do intake to increase efficiency, having chat as a central feature on the home page no longer made sense. However, the outdated design of our app was still encouraging members to rely on chat, hindering efficiency.
Two-phase approach
Based on the results of the usability study, we decided to break the navigation improvements into two phases. V1 would incorporate quick fixes that we could implement sooner, and with V2 we would launch a bottom navigation. I also designed and handed off V2, the bottom navigation phase, but left before it was shipped.
For V1, we decided to remove the existing home page and make the to-do list the home page to eliminate unnecessary taps. We also minimized the chat entry point to make it secondary to the to-do list content.
Using visual hierarchy to improve usability
Based on the fact that users were relying on chat to create new to-do's rather than using our structured to-do intake low accessible via the + button in the top right, I recommended three visual design updates to further elevate the + button in the hierarchy of the page while de-emphasizing the chat entry point. These included:
- Changing the + button from a secondary (outline) to a primary (black fill) style
- Updating the tab button styles to improve hierarchy and better differentiate from buttons
- Changing the chat avatar color to lower contrast and reduce hierarchy
I presented 3 different options for V1 with progressive levels of engineering cost. We were able to move forward with my top recommendation (on the right).
Impact
Thanks to these navigation improvements, users experienced less frustration with the member app, and usage of the structured to-do intake flow via the + button increased. This improved the efficiency of Yohana's service, lowering operational costs and increasing member satisfaction.