The idea for this one came from my time at home during COVID.

Watching my grandparents try to figure out their smartphones was equal parts heartbreaking and frustrating. They'd only ever used feature phones, and now they had to join Zoom calls, update apps and work out why the camera wasn't working. They had no manual and no guide, only a touchscreen and a lot of confusion.

I figured someone should build something for that. So I did.

At HCLTech I got to turn that thought into a project. It's a Flutter app that walks elderly users through everyday tasks on their smartphones, step by step, with bigger text, higher contrast and clearer touch targets.

Flutter was the right call here (a rare statement in itself). One codebase covered both platforms, so the app could reach more of the phones that needed it. We worked in an Agile setup and kept iterating on what users could use, instead of guessing what they needed.

This audience wasn't going to forgive bad UX. If it wasn't immediately intuitive, it had already failed. I had to think hard about every interaction, far more than I expected for something that looked so simple on paper. Watching my grandparents struggle taught me more about user-centred design than any textbook could.

I'm proud of this project because the reason behind it was real, and I got to help people I care about with something they use every day (their smartphones I mean, not my app).

My certificate for this one is here.