Hi, I’ve been working on our fourth project of Misk Academy UI/UX Bootcamp. This project was different because the idea was ours. Our team did two rounds of brainstorming until we reached a problem that we’re all interested in. We wanted to work on a solution for House chores organizing.
We did thorough desk research and we found out a lot of solutions for home family chores, but we found out people complaining about different tasks such as personal and work. Therefore we decided to go with the difficulty in accomplishing tasks in general. We thought it’s interesting to know why people don’t do their tasks and how can we help.
The first thing we did was making a project plan, in order to complete the project in two weeks. We followed this approach to design our solution:
1. Discover
1.1 Business Analysis
Leaf Diagram Findings:
- Notability and Procreate give the feelings of paper experience. Our solution should provide a similar feeling to fulfill the user sensation of really planning and accomplishing a task.
- Google engine is best at alternative suggestions based on what the user was intended to search for. The solution we create should suggest to the user based on his input as well. Helping him to achieve written tasks.
- Trello and Google Calendar are best-known and frequently used in task management. The solution we create will serve the same market with different features to stand out.
- Google Assistant is ready to help when and where users need it. Manage schedule, get help with everyday tasks, answering any question.
- Users need an app where they can easily access it. Especially that writing down tasks on a piece of paper are a pretty easy thing. Digitalizing this process should be as easy and simple.
1.2 User Research
To achieve our goals we conducted 16 interviews. And grouped the answers into an affinity map:
Affinity Map Findings:
- Most of the users use iPhone built-in apps like reminders and notes.
- User behavior regard organizing their tasks is divided to %50 prefer paper and %50 prefer digital. In our app, we want to make it convenient for both groups.
- Users categorize/divide their tasks based on importance and the date.
- The common things users include in their tasks are work, home, and personal tasks. Therefore, we’ll enable users to create lists and name them.
- Most of the users accomplish their tasks individually while some of them share them with others like family, friends, and colleagues. We’ll let users share lists using the most used apps such as WhatsApp.
- The reasons behind the delaying of tasks are unexpected things and inaccurate tracking time for a task.
- Not accomplishing a task affecting the mood and the productivity of another task, which drag them into an un-productivity circle.
2. Define
Based on user research we formed the following persona, her name is Salma.
Salma got a lot of things to do personal things, courses, work, and family responsibilities. She’s organized but sometimes things go out of control that her plans are messed up. She gets upset and she feels that she’s not productive anymore. In our solution, we’d like to make organizing different life tasks easier for the user and also, provide some help and guidance so the user doesn’t feel that he’s thinking alone.
In the following storyboard, you can see how Salma plans her upcoming things on the notes and iPhone and that makes her satisfied. But sometimes it doesn’t work as she expected and she keeps delaying her tasks.
Problem Statement
Users face difficulty in prioritizing multiple life tasks, which forces them to keep delaying some of them. This dramatically affects their mood in a bad way, leading them to feel overwhelmed and feel less productive.
Our solution should assist them in organizing tasks and encourage them to accomplish them in order to stay productive.
3. Design
Our proposed solution is an app. We decided to make it an app, because most of our users already use iPhone apps to write their tasks and to-do lists. Also, it would be suitable for different tasks that users do on the go. And to use the user location for more task-related suggestions. In addition to the Apple watch to make it more accessible for the user.
After the user research and the business analysis, we draw the journey map of the user to define where is the opportunity and how can our app solve the pain points of the user.
After the journey map and considering business and user need we defined our key features as the following:
Key features:
- Tasks showed based on location: The user can define a category with its location, and add as many tasks in the category. Tasks would be prioritized based on where the user is. He can check them directly from the iPhone widget.
- AI Guidance: Once a task is added, Planned app would provide a suggested plan or useful resources to help users start with the task.
- Recommend Solutions: If Planned noticed a delay in a certain task it would suggest an alternative solution for example an online store.
- Real Paper experience: Though the app is digital we want the user to still feel writing the tasks. We’ll provide him with multiple methods to add a task including handwriting.
- Reminders of lists: If the user is nearby a shop, he’ll get a reminder of a related list to view it and complete it.
- Apple Watch: Users can add, check and view tasks in the watch. Also has an option to receive notifications on it.
Based on the previous features we made the following site map of Planned:
The following is a workflow of a user adding a task and enabling the task:
Then, we designed a mid-fi wireframe to test it on the user, and we got feedbacks that was really useful for improvements.
Usability testing:
- Users thought the setting the goals screen wasn’t clear they thought it was confusing the terminologies and the purpose of it.
- Users wanted to know how to gain badges in the achievements on their profile page. We’ll add a description under each badge.
- Users want to see more in the overview. Therefore we added important tasks and shared tasks to be directly accessed from the overview page.
After the usability, we redesigned the mid-fi wireframe and created our brand to start the hi-fi design.
4. Deliver
Prototype Video
Future Work:
- Make the user access previous guides or search within multiple guides options.
- Enable the user to turn off and on the guidance and suggestions easily.
- Add voice assistance to the app to directly guide users on a certain task.
- Add more sharing options such as Slack and Microsoft teams.
- Improve the gamification (The gained badges) in the app.
- Customized theme color based on user preference. Also, add a night mode.
Finally, claps and thanks to the amazing team I worked with on this project: Asma Hamad, Ghaidalbakri, and Zahraa Nadhem. And thank you readers :D
