The fair-load view is the most-discussed screen in KinHolo and the one we rewrote most often. Five versions in, we had something honest that did not turn a household into a league table.
The thing we were trying to name
In most households, the work is not evenly split, and the unevenness is not really about who does more tasks. It is about who notices that a task exists. Someone keeps the running list of what has to happen this week, and that job is invisible until it is missed.
A chore chart cannot see this. It records completions. It says nothing about who decided the bins needed doing, who noticed the prescription was running out, or who remembered the school trip money.
Our first version counted completed tasks per person. It was accurate and completely useless. Everybody already knew the numbers, and seeing them made the conversation worse.
What we changed
Three decisions took the screen from provocative to useful.
- Count the noticing, not just the doing. Creating and assigning a task is work. The view reflects that, so the person carrying the planning shows up in the picture.
- Compare against the household, never against other households. There is no benchmark, no percentile, no “families like yours”. The only reference point is your own previous weeks.
- Never act on its own. KinHolo can suggest moving two evening tasks. It will not move them. A person confirms, or the suggestion quietly expires.
How the suggestion actually works
The engine looks at the last month of recurring chores across the adults in the household. When one adult has carried most of that work for the whole month, and the gap is not explained by a week away or a new baby, it proposes moving one or two recurring chores, never more, to the adult with the lightest load. The organiser sees the proposal first and decides whether to send it at all. If they do, it arrives on the receiver’s own screen, and it is the receiver who accepts or declines. Nothing moves until they say yes, and a declined suggestion is not repeated for weeks.
The proposal is worded as a question, and the load itself is drawn as a share of the household’s own week rather than as a number that can be compared with anyone else’s.
What we deliberately left out
No points. No streaks. No badges for children. Every reward mechanic we prototyped produced the same outcome in testing: the household optimised for the metric and stopped talking to each other. A calm tool has to be willing to be less sticky.
We also removed the weekly summary notification. It arrived on Sunday evenings and landed, in the words of one tester, like a performance review nobody asked for. The view is now something you go and look at when you want it.
A child’s chores are acknowledged by a parent, in one tap, with no score attached. That acknowledgement is the only feedback loop for children in the product, and it is deliberately the smallest one we could build.
Where it sits now
The fair-load view ships with the tasks module. It is private to the household, visible to adults by default, and a member with a view-only role sees only their own row. It can be turned off entirely without losing anything else in tasks. If it helps you have one honest conversation and then you never open it again, we would call that a success.
No other family organiser we tested makes household load visible at all. The ones that come close do it as gamification, which is the opposite of what the problem needs.
Want the next one?