Doable
The Productivity App
Project Brief
In today’s world, the Internet and digital tools have taken an increasingly important place in people’s lives. We have much better access to information and entertainment, which in itself has a wide variety, but can lead to distraction, poor planning, or a loss of purpose. Our minds are diverted from more important, meaningful work, towards pointless tasks or procrastination.
Over the course of this project, we aim to identify which tools are currently used to mitigate productivity pain points, and what are the key pros and cons among the top existing tools. Based on the results of this research, we intend to craft a possible solution.
Project Overview
Platform
iOS, Android
Role
Research, Design
Tools
Figma, InVision, Pen, Paper, Miro
The Challenges
We were given a topic—PRODUCTIVITY—as a starting point of the project.
There was no specific PROBLEM or GUIDANCE at the beginning. Also, the CLIENT was not clear yet.
Productivity is a broad topic since it relates to many aspects of the way people work to achieve their goals. Besides, everyone defines “productivity” differently. Despite the fact of working effectively, people also have many challenges or pain points that prevent them from reaching their goals.
Our research should explore both ORGANIZATION (e.g. goal setting, information management) and AREA OF APPLICATION (e.g. teamwork, personal life) involved in this wide topic. In addition, we will create a TOOL that supports users, help them to be more productive based on their personal and professional goals and needs.
Let's look at the market?
The productivity software market is extremely competitive, but also extremely diverse, so many niches might reveal themselves during our user research. The research revealed a few gaps in the market that we should explore:
- Users tend to favor tools that combine multiple features or connect with many other applications. These features can be collaboration, file sharing, note-taking, task or project management, etc.
- Team collaboration, project management, and knowledge sharing are of crucial importance.
- Due to Covid 19, there is a huge shift from office work to remote work.
Let's see what's going on?
I did the competitive analysis among top competitors to understand the marketplace and features that they are using for their productivity apps. I also studied things that they are doing well and what aspects need to be improved as a way to acknowledge strengths and weaknesses among productivity apps.
They are: Agenda, Basecamp, Notion, Todoist, Slack, and Mint
- Offers note-taking for meetings, journaling at work or as an agenda
- Supports integration with a wide variety of apps and services
- Offers a huge variety of content types to add. Can import data from other apps
- Integrates with many other collaboration and office tools
- Enables productivity reports, collaboration, and offline functionality
Noting Assumptions before Research
- We primarily targeted adults of working age, with established goals for their personal and/or professional life.
- We did not limit our demographics by gender, social class, or country, but we needed them to speak English.
- We targeted young adults trying to establish goals for their personal and/or professional life.
- We might be interested in hearing from people with a certain level of success in their personal or professional life, as well as productivity coaches, once again without demographic limitation.
Speaking with potential customers
For our discovery research, we spoke with ten participants. Below are some of the questions we asked during our interviews.
Defining Productivity
How do people define productivity?
How do people define success?
Which tools do people use to be more productive?
Organization
How do people define their goals?
How do people schedule an ordinary day?
How do people organize their data (documents, notes, etc.)?
Personal Life
Do people have life goals?
How do people balance work & life?
How do people keep on top of their finances?
What do people do to enjoy meaningful time with their friends & family?
Work Life
What are people’s biggest challenges when working with a team?
Do people prefer to work remotely or in an office?
What are people’s favorite communication tools?
Interview Insights
90% use tools to keep track of their goals
70% value creativity in their professional life
30% wouldn’t work on a perfect day
50% prefer working at an office over working remotely
60% think productivity is about working efficiently
50% mentioned looking for a tool that fits them
40% want to move to a better position
40% mentioned non-professional goals
30% mentioned time blocking doesn’t work for the
Which tool do people use to achieve their goals?
We wanted quantitative data to back up what we heard in our interviews. We did a survey to gather information about a participant’s choice of tools and applications when it comes to their productivity and to verify/confront our initial assumptions about our target demographics.
We shared our survey on social media to reach a wide range of people. We had a 10% response rate.
75% are younger than 40 years old and 44.5 % are students. Additionally, the COVID-19 clearly affected people’s work environment, as a large majority reported working from home:
61.2% work from home, 22.3% work in an office or a classroom.
27.8% are employed and 11.1% are self-employed.
Keeping up with Goals:
• 25% use a note application
• 19.6% use a to-do list
• 19.5% use journaling
Scheduling a day:
• 66.7% use a calendar
• 61.1% use a to-do list
• 55.6% use reminders
Documenting:
• 61.1% USE PEN & PAPER TOOLS
• 52.8% use Word, Pages, or Docs
• 47.2% use Excel, Numbers, or Sheets
• 33.3% use PowerPoint, Keynote, or Slides
• 27.8% use Apple Notes or Google Keep
Collaborating:
• 83.3% USE SIMPLE TOOLS WITH LIMITED FEATURES(calls or SMS)
• 77.8% use video calls
• 77.8% use e-mails
• 77.8% use individual IM platforms
• 50% use group IM platforms
Key Research Takeaways
- It's ok to target our professionals, but students should be our primary audiences based on the data and students need more help organising their days.
- Users' working styles are shifted from working in a office to working remotely, so that they need help to manage their work
- While we were expected advanced tools, the majority want simple tools as flexible as a pen and paper.
Synthesizing Our Research
Synthesizing our user research helped us define our primary persona—Angela—as our primary target audience are adults of working age, with established goals for their personal and/or professional life. We saved the other personas for a future version because of our time constraint and this was our MVP.
Synthesizing Our Research
We created the journey map based on the primary persona. This journey map is basically about the journey of a student over the course of a day—Angela. It reflects on her thoughts, actions, and feelings during a normal day. Creating this journey map showed us gaps where opportunities lie to create a more holistic solution for our primary persona.
What we decided to solve for
The research that we synthesized allowed us to define our problem for our primary persona. We created a problem statement so everyone on the team was on the same page with what needed to be solved.
The at-home student needs a tool that organizes her schedule, reminds her of her tasks, and provides her with a report of daily activities, so that she has more time to nurture a positive mindset, communicate with her peers, and enjoy a better work/life balance.
Design Principles
We came up with 4 design principles based on the research and our values as a team. These principles guided our focus while we developed our solution.”
Trustworthy
User Centric
Positive
Easy, fast & reliable
Brainstorming
Based on our research, we found that productivity apps are more popular in the sense of usage and convenience. Because apps were more popular than websites, we decided our solution should also be an app. In addition, we were debating about which features we should include in our app. We used the Kano Model to prioritize must-have features and baseline features for the app.
Concept Sketch/Paper Prototype
Based on our research data, we brainstormed some potential features and interfaces. As a result, we came up with two potential concept sketches. We then tested these two conceptual paper prototypes on people who fit our target audience.
- Concept A
This concept sketch allows users to see tasks by day and month, get reminders, and prioritize their tasks.
- Concept B
This concept sketch has side navigation, a timeline for the next day, and a daft area where users can add their tasks before setting up a goals.
What worked?
-
Ability to see what comes up the next day (concept B)
-
Badges (concept A)
- “New task” button on every page (concept B)
What to work on?
-
Confusing labels (“Inspirations,” “Statistics,” “Inbox”)
- Homepage shouldn’t scroll (concept B)
- “Search” (missing in concept A)
Sitemap
After brainstorming features and prioritizing them using the Kano model, we came up with the following sitemap. The sitemap provided us a clear vision for the product and allowed us to be on the same page for expectations with what we would design and build. It also gave us an idea of how to organize content and create a taxonomy for the app.
Wireframes
Labels and navigation placement took us a lot of time to decide. For example, many apps have a past/done area called “Logbook,” and a draft area called “Inbox.” However, we found that those labels are confusing to users, so we renamed them “Archives” and “Drafts.”
We originally placed key screens in a bottom navigation and other important screens in the left sidebar, but this solution was confusing to our usability particpants. As a result, we placed everything in the left off-canvas menu. However, after more testing we found people missed some critical functions in the app. Therefore, the solution was to streamline our navigation and place essential items in the bottom navigation.
Therefore, the solution was to streamline our navigation to the point and placed them into the bottom navigation.
Usability Testing
We targeted new users who fit our primary persona. Someone who is a student, in their early 20s, trying to maintain a work/life balance with school.
Prototype
100%
liked the simplicity & understood the app’s purpose
80%
used the word “help” when describing the app’s purpose
80%
of the experienced productivity app users found the app too simple
80%
showed confusion about the “close” button on the task details screen
40%
showed confusion about the tag features and how they should be used
20%
used the “Drafts” feature
What's Next?
- Explore the possibility of renaming the "Drafts" section since only a few users found it. Or test the response to removing the feature.
- Clarify the "tag" feature to make it make more sense to the users by adding descriptions or explanations during on-boarding.
- Consider adding a few interactions to make the app less simple and more interesting to use.
Lesson Learned
From this project, I found that research and usability testing are so important because we are able to identify the problems, understand the user’s needs, goals, and pain points. As a result, a product has been created based on those insights that are really beneficial to users. This design process is super important for UX designers.
Besides, studying productivity and learning about how people are working not only help us with the design process but also benefit us individually. Working efficiently requires many efforts and finding the best tool that fits our working styles is another important step.
