WeFlock is a mobile app for women and their partners to manage their house chores together. Women have been burdened with an imbalanced amount of care work even as they become working mothers. WeFlock tracks tasks women and their partners should carry out, making everything transparent in their partnership.

Year: 2024

Industry: Care work, family management

Roles: Research, ideation, user journey, user flow, information architecture, user interface design, prototype

WeFlock aims to improve gender equality in all partnership forms, such as marriage, co-parenting, and more, as partners manage their households.

Working mothers in early 30s to late 40s with young kid(s).

As this is a personal project, I worked independently as the Lead designer.

Even though this project conducted thorough research in the beginning by interviewing 7 mothers, I did not have the resources to continue to the testing phase yet.

To kickstart this project, I read books, article journals, and news regarding care work and its burden on women.

I interviewed 7 working mothers of diverse ages and occupations to understand their needs, experiences, and struggles surrounding their experience as a working mother. However, it’s essential to note that the women interviewed are in the middle socio-economic class since it’s hard to find women from the lower class participating in the research process. Please note that these questions are curated from all interview questions and are not in the correct order.

How do you define work-life balance? Do you try to achieve it?

How do you prioritise between work and family activities?

How do you communicate your paid work burden to your family?

“What activities from your family create a rewarding feeling for you?”

“What do you need to feel supported at home and the office?”

Sacrificing their time: They get tired, but they have established that being tired is inevitably a part of being a mother. Some might sacrifice their health or work salary to get both family and work done.

Flexibility: Multitasking everything: When prioritising, it depends on which one is more urgent and doable. The urgent moment is usually when their children get sick. They multitask. They slip things in between work.

Relationship with husbands: Husbands mainly help by playing with their kids, rarely with domestic chores. But, sometimes, their communication might get stalled, and it's hard to understand. When they have yet to talk with their husbands enough, problems might arise. But they try to find the time and the activity to bond.

Help is heavily needed: Help from their husbands is not enough. They need help from care workers, daycare, and parents/in-laws. Most of them are privileged to afford help. However, they still manage everything in the house, even the care workers’ tasks.

To better empathize with users, I created this user persona.

Identity: Lily is a working mom with a newborn. Her maternity leave ends, and she has to return to her paid job. Her middle to upper-middle-class income allows her to afford childcare, but she still finds household management overwhelming.

Goals: To manage her household chores so the whole family can work as a system to achieve work-life balance.

Pains: She has to do double the amount of work: unpaid care work & paid work. Even though she just returned to work, she struggles to balance working her paid job and caring for her family. She feels like she's being pulled from all directions.

Needs: A peaceful start to the day with everything prepared and an uncomplicated system in which she can manage the household well.

Make sure your partnership is held accountable.

Achieve equality in your partnership.

Track how tasks are carried out.

Due to limited resources, this project has yet to continue to the usability testing phase. However, testing is crucial for every design; hence, it should be the next phase.

Almost all of the informants had the privilege to afford help. This shows how the informants are not diverse enough in the socioeconomic dimension. Therefore, this project should research more on married working mothers in lower classes, such as blue-collar positions, where they could not afford help financially.

Since this project aims to achieve equality between partnerships, future research should include their male partners. We need to prioritise researching male partners first because, statistically, unequal care work distribution exists more in heterosexual relations (Lazarus & Mandel, 2023).

To see this case study in full, check out this link on my portfolio!