Collaborative home decision-making
- Type
- Product Design
- Role
- UX & Product Designer
- Timeline
- 12 weeks
- Year
- 2026
Settled is a collaborative home decision-making app designed to help couples make clearer, calmer choices when moving into or setting up a shared home. The project focused on reducing overwhelm, misalignment, and decision fatigue by turning large open-ended home decisions into structured, manageable steps. My role covered UX research, product structure, interaction design, visual direction, prototyping, and iterative refinement.
Designing and furnishing a home involves a large number of decisions across layout, furniture, style, function, and budget. For couples, this becomes more complex because each person may bring different priorities, tastes, and ways of making decisions. Existing inspiration platforms help users collect ideas, but offer little support for moving from inspiration to a confident final choice. The opportunity was to design a tool focused less on finding more options and more on helping people compare, align, and decide.
The project began by exploring how people currently make home decisions through research, interviews, journey mapping, personas, and opportunity mapping. Key insights showed that users lacked structure, struggled to compare options clearly, became overwhelmed as decisions accumulated, and experienced extra friction when decisions were shared. These insights shaped the product around guided onboarding, room-based organisation, decision statuses, shortlisting, comparison, and collaborative alignment.
The design was developed through sketches, wireframes, user flows, testing, and refinement. Early testing showed that the room-based structure and step-by-step decision flow were understood, but users needed clearer starting points, simpler screens, stronger transitions between stages, and more focused comparison. These findings informed later refinements and helped keep the final interface calm, structured, and decision-led.
The final outcome was a mobile app prototype supporting users from setup through to completing shared home decisions. Core flows included onboarding, room navigation, choosing a decision, exploring options, shortlisting, comparing, confirming a choice, tracking progress, and revisiting decisions later. The prototype also represented collaborative features — shared decisions, preference visibility, and alignment views — while recognising that live multi-user behaviour could not be fully simulated in a static prototype.
Settled helped me understand how product design can reduce uncertainty by giving people structure at the right moments. One of the biggest lessons was that the value of the app was not in adding more inspiration, but in helping users move from scattered ideas to confident decisions. If developed further, I would expand the collaborative features, test the decision comparison system with more users, and explore how the app could support more complex household situations over time.