Optimize — an app that facilitates a mindful usage of time
User Research case study
Introduction 👋🏻
For anybody with an Instagram or a Youtube account, the feeling of losing hours behind a screen without even realizing is a fairly common one. As students, fighting to fit deadlines, socializing, and sleeping, among other things, into a tight timeline we felt the need for a guide that could help us to spend our time more optimally. More mindfully.
Now, what do we mean by “mindful”?
To us, being mindful is about being “productive”, as well as spending time doing activities that give us a sense of satisfaction, learning, achievement, or peace within ourselves.
So, how do we optimize the way we use our time?
In this project, we aim to explore how via the medium of their phone, users can be encouraged to spend their time in a more productive or mindful way. We propose a mobile application “Optimize” that addresses the needs of the user to manage their time better by providing them opportunities to prioritize tasks and create their own tasks, as well as, suggesting suitable tasks for them.
Our aim is to facilitate the user to manage their time in a way that deems most rewarding/gratifying to them.
Designing the app
Through this project, I found an opportunity to research and collaborate alongside developers and designers.
My Role: Primary Researcher, Secondary UI Designer
Task: Research, design, and collaborate on developing the optimize app
Timeline: January 2019 - April 2019
Let’s Begin! ✔️
Scoping the Problem Area🔬
The things that pain and frustrate users.
As the first step, we conducted an online survey with 60 university students to validate our problem area and to understand how students utilize their time throughout the day. The survey also shed light on user behavior patterns, pain points, and objectives. The target audience was adolescents in the age range of 17–22 years of age.
The key takeaways:
- Users face problems in managing their time productively.
- Users do have a lot of free time that can be utilized.
- Users do believe that they could use their time in better ways. There is scope for optimization.
- There is a lot of mobile screen time that can be utilized more effectively.
- Users would appreciate a mobile application that helped them manage their time better.
User’s Problems to Solve
- Even though users have a list of tasks pending, they do not have the motivation to start working on those tasks.
- When users have a list of tasks, they need help structuring it into a timeline that fits their daily activities.
- Users also feel that they are unable to take out time for leisure activities or hobbies they want to pursue.
Based on these findings, we have refined our problem statement as follows:
“How can we use an individual’s phone to help them manage their tasks daily and spend their time in a way that they will consider most rewarding?”
Research, Research, and more Research 🔎
Investigating previous work done in the field.
📝 Literature Review
We conducted secondary research by consuming website content as well as 15 literature articles to gain a further understanding of previous work done in the area of productivity and mindfulness, as well as using technical mediums developed to improve productivity to add to our domain knowledge.
The summary of our findings is as follows:
- As per a study on healthcare professionals using smartphones to increase their productivity, tasks included are to-do lists, dictation software, blogging and tweeting tools, etc. This highlights the importance of a holistic platform that helps people take conscious decisions towards leading a more productive and mindful lifestyle.
- In another experiment, researchers used a ten-question survey to monitor the impact of e-mentoring on an individual’s productivity. Unsurprisingly, 88% of participants agreed that such a system boosted their performance.
- Also, another study showed that a leisure time mentoring mobile application motivated adolescent students to spend their time more constructively. It motivated them to indulge in new interests, sports as well as nature-based activities.
- A study on individual vs group-centric vs. individual-centric group goals proved that efficiency and success are 36% higher in the latter two categories.
- According to another study, the four factors essential to learning are drives, cues, responses, and rewards
- According to another study, framing an app in such a way that it emphasizes negative behavior affects productivity more than when the app emphasizes positive behavior. In fact, only the participants who were exposed to the negative framing condition actually showed an improvement in their productivity.
🎯 Competitive Analysis
As the next step, we studied time management and productivity applications already present in the market to understand the provisions already in the market as well as recognize the gap in the market that we can cater to.
We studied 4 applications, namely - Habitica, Do it Now, Engross, and SmarterTime.
Our key learnings:
- Most of the existing applications were oriented towards keeping a record of your time or scheduling tasks and to-do lists.
- Apps that recommended tasks based on daily to-do lists performed better.
- Creating groups to do work as a community can get people to be motivated if they have friends performing similar activities.
- Gamification results in indulging the user in the tasks and projects, as it quantifies their progress.
- Verifying the tasks performed based on location or phone activity yields more effective results as fake tasks get detected.
Solution Areas 👨🏻💻
Investigating possible solutions for observed user needs.
We observed that, among our users, there is a lot of mobile screen time that can be utilized more effectively.
Our users carry their mobile phones constantly and spend a lot of time passively using entertainment-based applications.
We saw it fit to draw upon this dependence on phone screens and convert it into a medium to help users be more productive.
Drawing from our knowledge and analysis, we developed a list of possible features on a mobile-based application to help our potential users manage their time mindfully. We realized the need for a system that captures both short-term and long-term tasks and goals.
In order to determine which features were most relevant to users, which features required most emphasis, as well as, how many clicks away a feature should be, we asked 80 users to rate the importance of each feature on a scale of 1–5.
We also coded the domains of different tasks/goals our users carry out over the week based on our initial survey results as well as secondary research.
Mapping User Journey 🗺
How User Task Flow looks like
In order to understand the mental model of users when using a time management application such as ours, the team of 4 designers grouped together the tasks using affinity mapping.
This helped us determine which features on the application belong together in different sections of the applications. These learnings, paired with the feature priority, were translated into the user flow of our application.
The Solution 👨🏻💻
We developed Optimize as a mindfulness-based task management application.
The novelty of the application is that it rids the daunting task of having the user take all the decisions which are generally a time-consuming process.
The existing applications in the domain expect the user to add every bit of the process manually. Whereas, our application uses competitive analysis(a machine learning paradigm) as a method to suggest the user with various modules, and activities with effective long and short-term goals.
As part of the project, we have developed a recommendation system that recommends task to the user that is befitting to the amount of free time they have currently. We have created a mobile application that allows users to put all their work and tasks together in one place. It does so by syncing their Google calendar data as well as maintaining a list of projects and a to-do list. The application classifies the user’s activities into 2 broad categories according to the duration- short-term and long-term goals. Short-term activities include tasks that can be performed at once, while long-term goals include projects that are completed over a span of many small modules. The application then suggests tasks to the users based on various factors like their mood, free time available, etc. The application also keeps track of how the users spend their time throughout the day and provides comprehensive statistics describing the same. The app aims to inculcate as much freedom and flexibility as possible.
The Design 💎
Due to a shortage of time, and incoming deadlines, our primary UI designer proposed directly making high-fidelity prototypes.
Evaluation — Final Results ✨
Since we didn’t have the opportunity to test our wireframes, we decided to have a more intensive evaluation of our hi-fidelity prototype.
📝 Task Evaluation
We created a set of basic tasks to analyze the ease of understanding and the usability of our app. The high-fi prototype was used by the users to attempt these tasks. We tested how easily the users could understand their goals and translate them into actions to be carried out on the interface. Based on these observations we moved on to generating our refined model for the app.
📝 Think Aloud Sessions
The high-fi prototype was used for a think-aloud session on our app in order to get a review of the “user flow” and user experience of our app. The users were also questioned about whether they found the system useful and meaningful. They were asked if they would be willing to use the app.
What we can improve
Based on our evaluation results we compiled a list of items that needed improvement in the application design. This was as follows:
- Font sizes need to be increased.
- Users need to be provided more flexibility in personalizing the app’s interfaces according to their preferences.
- The privacy provided by the app needs to be increased.
- The XP system needs to be explained better. A breakup
of the points corresponding to each task needs to be
provided. - The statistics should be represented better: The graphs
and charts should be a part of the statistics section The
detailed breakup if the day should be optional and can
be seen after clicking a button. - The app needs to recognize and prevent errors and provide a proper description of the errors that may occur. There should also be descriptive instructions for the steps to be taken to recover from the error.
My Learnings 💯
- Working with developers is always a learning experience. You learn to take fast, robust decisions. There are always trade-offs to make between feasibility and user experience.
- There is a lot of value in carrying out user evaluation at research at the wireframing stage. Re-iteration at the UI design stage takes a lot of time.
- Users are key. Your focus should be on the users and not the technology.
