Settled
Collaborative home decision-making
Settled is a collaborative mobile app designed to help couples make clearer decisions while setting up a shared home. Rather than adding more inspiration to sort through, it gives home decisions a structure: organise by room, compare options, understand each other’s preferences and move towards a confident choice. I worked across research, product structure, interaction design, visual direction, prototyping and iteration.
- Type
- Product Design
- Role
- UX & Product Designer
- Timeline
- 12 weeks
- Year
- 2026
The challenge
From inspiration to decision
Setting up a home involves a large number of connected decisions across furniture, layout, style, function and budget. The difficulty is not always finding ideas; it is narrowing them down, comparing trade-offs and reaching a decision with confidence.
When two people are making those choices together, different priorities, tastes and ways of deciding can add another layer of friction. Existing inspiration platforms are useful for collecting possibilities, but offer much less support once users need to compare, align and actually choose.
That created the central opportunity for Settled: design around the act of deciding, rather than simply giving people more things to choose from.
What I learned
I explored how people currently make home decisions through interviews, journey mapping, personas and opportunity mapping. The research pointed to several recurring sources of friction that shaped the product direction.
A lack of structure
Large home projects can feel like one continuous list of decisions, making it difficult to know what to deal with next.
Difficult comparisons
Ideas are easy to collect, but much harder to compare once users need to move from possibilities to a final choice.
Decision overload
As choices accumulate across multiple rooms, the cognitive load grows and individual decisions become harder to resolve.
Shared decisions add friction
When two people are deciding together, differences in priorities and preferences need to become visible without turning every choice into a discussion from scratch.
These findings shifted the concept away from being another inspiration tool. Settled needed to behave more like a decision-making system: breaking the wider project into manageable choices and helping users move each one towards a clear outcome.
Turning insight into product structure
The research translated into a small set of product decisions that gave the experience its structure.
In response to the finding:A lack of structure
Room-based organisation
Breaking the home into rooms gives users a smaller, more manageable context for each set of decisions.
In response to the finding:Decision overload
Visible decision states
Each decision can move through a clear process, helping users understand what still needs attention and what has already been resolved.
In response to the finding:Difficult comparisons
Shortlist and compare
Instead of continuously collecting options, users can narrow them down and compare the strongest choices directly.
In response to the finding:Shared decisions add friction
Shared preferences
Collaborative views make individual preferences easier to see, helping couples understand where they already agree and where a decision still needs discussion.
Developing and testing the experience
I developed the experience through sketches, user flows, low-fidelity wireframes and prototype testing. The early work focused on how users would move from setting up their home to choosing a room, opening a decision, exploring options and eventually reaching a choice.
Early testing suggested that the room-based structure and step-by-step decision flow were understandable, but also exposed places where the experience needed more guidance. Users needed clearer starting points, simpler screens, stronger transitions between stages and a more focused way to compare shortlisted options.
Those findings informed the next iteration and helped reduce unnecessary complexity. Rather than adding more controls or content, the interface became more explicit about where users were in a decision and what they could do next.
Designing for clarity
Because Settled is intended to reduce decision fatigue, the interface needed to feel calm and structured rather than visually demanding. The visual direction therefore supports the product logic: clear hierarchy, generous space, predictable states and enough personality to make the experience feel considered without competing with the decisions themselves.
The brand and interface were developed together so that the product could feel cohesive from its overall identity through to individual interaction states.
The final product
A clearer path from idea to decision
The final prototype supports users from initial setup through to completing and revisiting shared home decisions.
Core flows include onboarding, room navigation, choosing a decision, exploring options, shortlisting, comparing, confirming a choice and tracking progress across the home.
The prototype also represents collaborative behaviour through shared decisions, preference visibility and alignment views. Because the project was presented as a static prototype, live multi-user behaviour could not be fully simulated, but the interaction model was designed around that collaborative use case.
Explore the prototype
Open the final high-fidelity Settled prototype. The experience is designed primarily for a mobile viewport.
Reflection
Settled reinforced how much value product design can create by giving people structure at the right moment. The strongest idea in the project was not helping users find more inspiration; it was helping them move from scattered possibilities towards a decision they could feel confident about.
It also made the connection between research and interface decisions much clearer to me. The room structure, decision states, comparison flow and collaborative features all came from understanding where people were getting stuck rather than from adding features for their own sake.
Next steps
Test collaboration with two active users
The prototype represents shared decision-making, but a live multi-user version would allow the collaboration model to be tested properly.
Push the comparison model further
I would test how much information users need when comparing shortlisted options and where comparison starts to become overwhelming itself.
Explore more complex households
The current concept is centred on couples. A further iteration could explore how the system changes when decisions involve families, housemates or different levels of responsibility.