JollySquare
Helping kids and parents start the day with joy, calm, and organized morning routines.
Introduction
00- Introduction
About the Project
Jolly Square is an interactive app that helps parents guide their kids through fun and structured morning routines. Children follow visual instructions on their tablet, while parents manage everything from their own device.
Step-by-step routine: Visual tasks like waking up and brushing teeth.
Customizable: Parents tailor routines to their child’s needs.
Leisure time: Music, books, movies, and games for a smoother morning.
Buzz for parents: Weather, breakfast ideas, and parenting tips updates.
Target Audience
The primary users of Jolly Square are Parents with young children (2–8):
Looking for an easy way to guide and motivate kids through routines.
Jolly Square helps parents build a calm, organized, and joyful morning routine for their young children. The app serves as a friendly guide to make everyday rituals smoother and more engaging for the whole family.
Support Parents: Offers customizable tools to create peaceful, stress-free routines tailored to each child’s needs.
Motivate Children: Uses visual cues, cheerful music, and playful hippo animations to make tasks like brushing teeth, dressing, and breakfast fun and motivating.
Provide Useful Information: Delivers real-time updates on weather, traffic, and child-related news to help parents plan the day wisely.
Enhance the Morning Experience: Features calming wake-up music, upbeat tunes for activities, and soothing melodies during breakfast to create a relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere.
Empathy
01- Empathy
Before designing the Jolly Square app, I followed the Delft Design Approach to understand the problem space and the people affected. The design theme focused on Morning Rituals and the goal was to improve these routines for families with young children.
The Delft Design Approach guided me from context (why) through interaction (how) to the product concept (what). I examined my own morning ritual to uncover its structure, emotions, and pain points, helping me identify opportunities for improvement.
What is a morning ritual?
Morning rituals are daily tasks like hygiene, exercise, and breakfast. Additional activities, such as meditation, biking instead of driving, or dressing thoughtfully, can boost energy and focus. Weekend routines are more flexible, allowing for relaxation and personal enjoyment.
Why your morning ritual is the way it is?
Structure & Planning: Saves time and reduces uncertainty.Focus & Efficiency: Supports concentration on work or study.Preparation & Readiness: Builds confidence for the day.Flexibility & Enjoyment: Reduces stress and boosts energy.Stress Relief: Combining tasks with enjoyable activities enhances well-being.
How I interact with my morning ritual?
Weekdays: A disciplined plan prioritizing efficiency and structure, like a determined mentor guiding me.
Weekends: A flexible routine balancing essential tasks with enjoyable activities, like a playful guide helping me recharge.
My Morning Rituals & Must-Have Product
Observing a Family’s Morning Ritual
I observed a family during their morning ritual, immersing myself in their experience to understand their behaviors, needs, and feelings as part of the Empathize stage in Design Thinking.
Name: Nasrin

Age: 38

Gender: Female

Occupation: Manager
Additional information: Nasrin’s family includes her husband (Hadi) , her daughter (Nika), and their dog (Juli). Her mother lives 6 month a year with them.
Mind mapping her morning ritual
I created a mind map of Nasrin’s daily activities to understand her routine, priorities, and challenges.
Social map
I drew Nasrin’s social map. In her case, the social map illustrates the key people involved in her morning ritual such as her husband, daughter, mother, and even the family dog and highlights how their roles, needs, and interactions shape her daily routine.
Timeline tool
I drew Nasrin’s timeline tool. It maps her morning ritual step by step in chronological order, showing how tasks, interactions, and responsibilities unfold over time and where challenges or opportunities for improvement appear.
Walk-through
I created Nika’s walk-through. It follows her morning ritual, showing how she experiences each step from waking up and getting dressed to having breakfast and preparing for school, while revealing her needs, feelings, and possible challenges in the process.
User Research for Jolly Square App
User research was key in shaping JollySquare to address real challenges. A mix of qualitative and quantitative methods provided valuable insights into user needs, behaviors, and preferences.
​Qualitative Research
I interviewed parents to understand their struggles with morning routines, covering challenges, motivation, time management, and tech use. Insights on kids’ responses to structure, visuals, and rewards helped shape JollySquare’s design, making mornings more organized and engaging.
Quantitative Research
I conducted a survey with parents of young children to quantify pain points, needs, and behaviors around morning routines. The data helped shape JollySquare, ensuring it’s both practical and user-friendly.
During the empathy mapping phase, I analyzed parents' and children's experiences using sticky notes to categorize their thoughts, feelings, actions, and challenges. This helped uncover key insights to design JollySquare as an engaging and stress-free solution for morning routines.
Based on insights from parent interviews and surveys, I created user personas to represent the app’s target audience. These personas help guide the design process by focusing on parents' goals, challenges, and preferences during their children's morning routines.
The Journey Map for Nasrin’s Morning Routine highlights how the JollySquare app helps her guide Nika through a smooth, engaging morning, balancing efficiency, motivation, and planning while tackling distractions and time constraints.
Define
02- Define
Who is experiencing the problem? Nasrin, a 38-year-old manager and mother living with her husband and young daughter, struggles to balance her family’s morning routine while preparing for her own workday.

What is the problem? Mornings in Nasrin’s household are often chaotic and stressful. Her daughter needs constant reminders to complete tasks like brushing teeth, getting dressed, and eating breakfast, leaving Nasrin feeling rushed and exhausted before the day even begins.

Where does the problem show up? The problem occurs at home during morning routines, when parents and children navigate multiple tasks at once—getting ready, eating, organizing school items, and checking weather or traffic updates.

When does the problem occur? It happens every weekday morning, especially during the busy hours before school and work, when time is limited and distractions are high.

Why is the problem important? Because stressful mornings set a negative tone for the entire day. A disorganized routine can lead to frustration for parents, resistance from children, and less quality family time. Jolly Square helps families create a calmer, more enjoyable, and structured start to their mornings.
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Ideate
03- Ideate
Examining competitors is a crucial step in the process. To better understand personal financial management apps, I analyzed three popular applications among Iranian users: Parmis, Ghias, and Poolaki, focusing on their key features.
The SWOT analysis for JollySquare highlights the app’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, showing how it supports parents like Nasrin in creating smooth, engaging morning routines. It balances efficiency, motivation, and planning, while identifying areas for improvement and external challenges that could impact adoption or user experience.
Preliminary requirments
- The user should experience a simpler and less stressful morning routine.
- The user should complete morning tasks more efficiently without feeling overwhelmed.
- The routine should involve fewer decisions to help minimize mental load.
- The routine should not be extended more than 15 minutes.
- The user should save time during the morning routine and not extend it further.
- The user should experience a more positive and uplifting morning routine, possibly through features that enhance mood and overall well-being.
- The routine should maintain the quality of interactions with family members, ensuring that any changes do not disrupt family dynamics.
- The design should allow the user to personalize the experience to suit their family's specific needs.
- The design should seamlessly integrate into the user’s existing morning routine.
Ideation Through Sketching
I sketched three initial concepts to explore different ways of improving family morning routines. These include The Morning Dashboard, a fridge-mounted monitor; The Morning Beacon, a smart device with light and sound cues; and Jolly Square, an interactive app with visual step-by-step routines.
Fridge-mounted monitor
The Morning Dashboard is a family-friendly monitor that attaches to the fridge, displaying daily tasks with icons, colors, and gentle reminders. It helps children and parents stay on track together, turning morning routines into a shared, stress-free activity.
Smart device with light and sound
The Morning Beacon is a child-friendly smart device that uses gentle light and sound cues to guide families through their morning routines. Its playful design reduces stress, fosters structure, and makes daily rituals engaging for children.
Interactive app with visual step-by-step routines
Jolly Square is an interactive app that helps parents guide their kids through fun and structured morning routines. Children follow visual instructions on their tablet, while parents manage everything from their own device.Step-by-step routine: Visual tasks like waking up and brushing teeth.
Using a Harris Profile select a concept for further development
To choose the most promising concept, I applied a Harris Profile. This method compares ideas against key criteria—ease of use, feasibility, engagement, flexibility, scalability, and cost—helping me identify the best direction for further development.
Prototype
04- Prototype
Jolly Square’s Information Architecture is designed to provide a clear and intuitive navigation flow, allowing parents and children to easily access morning routine tasks and related features. The structure prioritizes simplicity, engagement, and efficiency helping parents customize routines, track progress, and motivate their children, while ensuring children can follow visual steps with minimal guidance.
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User flows are crucial for spotting gaps in the experience and aligning ideas with the team and stakeholders early on. They help us design from both the child's and parent's perspective, making the app more intuitive, engaging, and user-friendly.
The wireframe serves as a blueprint for the app’s layout, defining its structure without incorporating detailed visuals such as colors or typography. Throughout the design process, I created multiple wireframes, refining them based on iterative improvements.
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The design system for the Jolly Square app is built around creating a playful, engaging, and user-friendly experience for both children and parents. We focused on ensuring the app is accessible and intuitive, with a cohesive aesthetic that fosters both fun and functionality.
Color Palette
The color scheme is vibrant and visually appealing, using soft pastel hues for a calming effect, complemented by bright accents to highlight important elements. This approach ensures the app feels friendly and approachable for children while maintaining clarity and usability across different devices.
Typography
I selected the Dongle font, a rounded sans-serif typeface, to enhance readability and approachability, making the app inviting for users. Its curved design mirrors the playful nature of the app, complementing the rounded iconography.
Iconography
Icons are simple, rounded, and easily recognizable to help young users intuitively understand the app’s functions. A consistent icon style supports a cohesive visual language throughout the app.
Logo
At the center, four overlapping rounded squares rotated at 35° form a playful pattern. A bright yellow square with a smiling face sits in the middle, radiating happiness and warmth. Soft pastel background squares highlight the cheerful central character, reflecting the name Jolly.
Illustration
Smooth transitions between screens and subtle animations for the hippo character keep children engaged and create a calm, enjoyable experience while completing tasks.
Buttons
The app features six types of buttons, each designed for specific actions. These include large and small rectangular buttons with text or illustrations, and square buttons in various sizes. Each button has six states—Default, Hover, Clicked, Disabled, Error, and Text—ensuring responsive and intuitive interactions with clear visual feedback.
Onboarding
I designed three onboarding screens featuring a hippo brushing teeth, eating breakfast, and going to school to introduce daily routines in a fun, child-friendly way. I created these scenes myself using sourced hippo illustrations and customized Freepik Storyset backgrounds. The goal was to make onboarding engaging for kids and intuitive for parents
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Log-in
The sign-in page offers flexible access through email/password login or quick Google and Facebook options. It also supports easy account creation for new users and a reset feature for forgotten passwords.
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Routine Customization
Once logged in, users select how many children (up to 4) will use the app. They can then choose from a handy list of pre-set morning tasks tailored to kids’ routines. Need something special? Custom tasks can be added in seconds to personalize each child’s To-Do list.
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Profile Page
After setting morning tasks, users land on the Profile Page showing each child’s name and chosen character. They can add new profiles using the bold Add Profile button and select from six playful yellow animal characters. Selected characters are highlighted, and profiles can be edited or switched with ease
Home Screen
Home Screen offers quick access to search, recent activity, and personalized features like mood-based suggestions. A hamburger menu neatly organizes profile info, goals, reports, customization tools, and support settings. Sections like “Newly Added,” “Trending Now,” and “Top Picks” keep content fresh, relevant, and engaging.
Today's Routine
Today’s Screen shows the child’s morning routine as a step-by-step journey, guided by a cheerful character like the hippo. Each task like waking up, brushing teeth, or eating breakfast is illustrated and includes a timer to keep things on track. Parents tap the “Done” button after each task, triggering a visual confirmation and moving to the next step.
Leisure Screen
The Leisure section offers fun, calming, and educational content tailored to each child’s preferences. Kids can enjoy curated music playlists, engaging storybooks, interactive learning games, and age-appropriate movies. Each option supports relaxation, creativity, and balanced screen time throughout the day.
Buzz Screen
The Buzz Screen keeps parents informed with daily essentials like weather, traffic, and breakfast ideas. It also offers parenting news, financial tips, local events, and expert advice on child development and mental health. With alerts, activity suggestions, and a Success Plan feature, it helps parents stay organized and support their child’s growth.
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Using Maze, we conducted structured online user testing. Participants were asked to complete a specific task scenario for a parent, which included:Using Maze, we conducted structured online user testing. Participants completed a parent task scenario, including logging in, adding a task, visiting NIKA’s profile, navigating the Home page, checking today’s plan in the Today section, viewing the Splash Time animation, completing the task, and checking the weather in Buzz.In the final project phase, these tests evaluated how easily participants could complete their goals, providing insights into the system’s accessibility and usability. The findings were crucial for identifying weaknesses and guided targeted improvements, significantly enhancing the overall user experience.
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