Designing For Better Time Management
Lately I’ve been working on my UX skills at Coursera’s Interaction Design Specialization. As a part of its capstone project I ended up designing a time management tool called Tovi. On this post I’ll run you through my design process.
At the start we were given 3 design briefs to choose from and I chose the one that asked us to look into alternate ways of presenting time. This peaked my interest because I had been recently working with interesting time management tools and trying out Getting Things Done type of task management. Because of this I decided to approach the brief from time management point of view.
Needfinding
I started the process with needfinding, which I did by interviewing and observing 3 people using their own time management tools. Because I knew I was going to design something digital, I thought it would be interesting to observe people who are not using digital time management for whatever reason. Knowing why they shy away from them could present valuable design opportunities.
Through these interviews I learned that people are unhappy with weekly calendar views on mobile devices and love paper calendars precisely because it gives them such a clear overview of their weekly schedule. They also felt that digital calendars fall short of paper calendars when it comes to juggling multiple projects. People preferring paper task lists did so because they felt they were more easily glanceable and let them know exactly what it is they need to do.
Ideation
I took all the things I learned in the interviews and broke it down in user needs. I then distilled those needs into following point of view to guide my design process:
“Digital time management should be as easy and intuitive as using paper calendar and to-do lists. By combining the good sides of both paper and digital tools, we can create a more functional, desirable, intuitive and informative solution for time management.”
I also looked in to pre-existing solutions for these user needs and gathered design inspiration from various sources.
After that it was time to really dive into the design process and start thinking of possible solutions. I developed some preliminary concepts which I storyboarded and then built into paper prototypes.
Heuristic Evaluation
Then I took the prototypes and started heuristic evaluation on them. One heuristic evaluation was done by observing a user use the prototype in person and 2 more through Google Hangouts with classmates. These evaluations proved to be valuable because they helped me to pin point some problems in mydesign very early on. The main thing I learned was that Getting Things Done task list structure isn’t that intuitive and user need more guidance on how the system works. Based on these insights I built the first digital screens for the protype.
At this point I revisited design brief to make sure I was on the right track and took another look at my heuristic evaluations. I made a list of changes needed for the protype based on the HEs and made that into a project plan to keep track of my progress.
One of the unique things about my design was the radial weekly view on the calendar. This was inspired by smart watches that show calendar events on the dial. However, I don’t think it’s enough alone so I added a timeline view next to it. The idea behind this design was to make the weekly schedule glanceable, similar to, or even better than, paper calendars. Both calendar events and tasks can be viewed on the same screen so the user has better overall picture of the things he needs to do, which was one of the original user needs.
User testing
At this point the protype already had main screens and navigation in place so it was time to start getting ready for user testing. I chose basic tasks I wanted to test and recruited users for testing. I mainly wanted to know if users understand what they’re seeing without explaining it and if the system is intuitive enough for them to perform basics tasks.
User testing exposed 3 issues: 1. The prototype didn’t work on some computers. 2. The task lists explanation font was too small 3. Checkbox to complete and star to prioritize wasn’t a familiar pattern for everybody.
I fixed most of the discovered problems to the next iteration of the prototype but I wasn’t sure what to do about checkboxes and stars on the task lists so I thought it’s something that should be tested. I did an alternate version with titles above the columns and tested that against the simple version at usertesting.com. The results were inconclusive because of the small sample size, but this additional user testing made me realize the problem can be circumvented by making error recovery easier by not making list items disappear after they’ve been marked complete. This allows the user to click around and learn the logic if it’s unclear.
Final steps
After this it was time to finalize the prototype and make it pretty for presentation. I thought of a name for the app and came up with Tovi, which is finnish and means “a while” or a brief moment. I created a logo and added some color to the prototype.
The prototype is still far from perfect, but that’s sort of the point: it doesn’t have to be. Unfortunately, and fortunately, the course assignments forced me to do some things earlier than I was comfortable with. I would have rather kept the prototype lower fidelity longer throughout the design process. The fortunate part is that it forced me to go public with this, which I probably wouldn’t have done otherwise. But here it is, check out the prototype on the video below. Feel free to comment if you stumble upon this!
