Adventures in creating a time boxing app
For our fourth project in the madness that is General Assembly UXDI program, my fabulous team (consisting of Taylor Green, Grace Kim, and Erin Hill) went through quite a revolution in regards to our project. We convened for the first time at a point of exhaustion, on the afternoon following a long night working on the third project. We were dead, and that gave birth to our initial inspiration — to create an app that would timebox specifically for days off. We believed that a day off from work, from emails, from social media was essential to mental health, a work-life balance, as well as satisfaction in the workplace.
We started on a screener survey and interviewing people right away — a combination of people who were procrastinators (and therefore pushed everything off to the last minute, and didn’t necessarily plan to have a day off), and super organizers (so that we would understand how planning could be successful). After some affinity mapping, we created two personas:
The trouble with ideas is that there are too many possibilities. There are too many options, avenues that could be entertained. Our free-day timeboxing turned morphed into a calendar app with specific features to help the user plan for a healthy work-life balance. Our original problem statement was:
Avery needs a way to schedule her time in a proactive way to help her stop procrastinating and take back control of her day.
How might we provide Avery with the motivation necessary to keep her on track and productive throughout her day to protect time for the activities she loves.
In our first iteration, we developed the bones and muscles of what our final app would be: a feed of friend’s accomplishments (“social feed”) to serve as inspiration, a monthly and daily calendar, a “holistic pie” that would serve as a breakdown of the different categories of tasks (i.e. work tasks, personal tasks, how much sleep, etc.). We also featured a visualization of accomplishments — a garden, whose elements represent specific accomplishments. For example, birds would represent every time the user exercised, bees represent work tasks, etc. We thought of having a garden because the user could see how it would grow over the course of time. We also designed a garden that included the accomplishments of the user’s friends — a community garden.
The basis for the garden and the social feed was to integrate some kind of social accountability. Our interviews have shown that people are more likely to complete tasks if there are real people involved: a friendly text from a friend, or an ongoing “checking in” if the participant and a friend are accomplishing something together, such as working out.
However, from the usability testing, participants expressed confusion about the garden. In addition, our instructors said that the scope of our design was too broad. It felt like a ton of bricks — what were we supposed to do with that information? We couldn’t do a complete redesign in the time that we had, and yet we had to redefine our purpose without having to do an enormous amount of work.
So we worked through it — we had discussions regarding how to narrow the scope and redefine what we actually wanted to accomplish with the app. We did another round of feature prioritization and redefined our problem statement:
Avery has a stressful job and is always working on some labor-intensive project. She struggles with procrastination, even after trying to stop by making to-do lists and using phone-based calendars. Her work obligations are so demanding that she never has time to relax and go out with her friends.
How might we provide Avery with the motivation necessary to keep her on track & productive throughout her day to ensure a healthy work-life balance?
We had to scrap the whole garden idea, and we decided to refocus on integrating a more robust social accountability aspect. We decided to increase the accountability by allowing friends to have access to a user’s calendars. Of course, within limits. If a user wants to be held accountable, what better way than to provide access to calendars?
In addition to these features, we allowed users to create “support groups,” — specific groups of friends to support each other. In addition, on the task DP, we allowed users to specify if events should be public, private, or viewable by any of their groups. To enable some level of communication (without having to create a whole messaging system, which would have been difficult in our time constraints), we gave users the ability to comment on each other’s tasks. That way, friends could hold each other accountable.
Overall, I am very pleased with how the end product turned out. Yes, I believe there is a lot of room for growth in this app. The way that it is built now does not holistically solve our problem. However, we worked really hard on it, and we have grown tremendously as designers. I believe that we did successfully narrow down the scope of the project, and our final product is much more robust, practical, and representative of real users’ needs.
