Smart Time Manager (Interaction Design Capstone Project from Coursera)
I enroll into the Interaction Design Capstone Project from Coursera and I chose to work on the project of “Time”. I have just finished working on the final prototype this week. I would like to share my experience in this course and how I worked the things out one by one.
Stage 1: Needsfinding
I started with the needsfinding, I found 3 friends of mine to observe and interview them about how they arrange their daily events with the use of different kinds of calendar app (like Google Calendar, Wunderlist, etc.)
One important insight I got at this stage is that everyone got some problems on using different app and could not satisfy their needs. I would like to create a prototype according to their needs and to help them arrange the time better.
Stage 2: Ideation
After observation, I started to summarize the finding and to brainstorm different ideas. One important I learnt here is “POV” (Point of View) to think from the “users’ needs and their perspective”. I am targeting the “working adult” group, and I was thinking about to create a calendar app that can help them to arrange tiny tasks. It means those tasks which may require 5–30 minutes to be finished but there is no definite time assigned for them in the calendar.
Actually we have many “time gap” (time fragments) between different events everyday, like commuting to school/company, lunch break, waiting for meeting, and all these time accumulated could be a great amount of time that we can make use of to finish those tiny tasks.
So it is the basically my prototype idea that to help users “managing the trivial tasks to make efficient use of the time fragment”.
Basically I did created 2 storyboard for ideation,
my first idea is to limit the mobile usage when users use the mobile for too long time to make user focus on work. But I found that it may harm the user experience by making them unhappy to lock the mobile.
Here is my second idea that to help users managing their trivial tasks and to make efficient use of “time gap”
Stage 3: First Paper Prototype
With defined idea, I now have a clear direction of creating a paper prototype. The core function of my app would be
1. Getting users’ calendar information
2. Allowing users to input the trivial tasks
3. Smart arrange of those trivial tasks between major events of calendar
4. Notification when there is “time gap” to do trivial tasks
To achieve above functions, I create a simple paper prototype with UIs as below
Stage 4: Testing, evaluation and redefine
Very soon, I found my 3 friends again to collect their feedback about my first version of paper prototype. The general feedback was quite positive. But they would like to see a more elegant UI with better screen arrangement. Thus I modified and drafted another version of prototype as below.
Later I develop a online prototype by using Creator.io, which is very easy to use yet powerful. Eventually I spend around 1 hour to finish working on prototype.
With the support from Coursera, I can launch a simple online A/B testing with 4 participants. It was an interesting experience for me to let my prototype to be tested by the people around the world. And here are some of the screenshot captured from the testing website
Stage 5: Final Prototype
With the great feedback from those testers, I further improve my prototype and working on the final version of it on the Creator.io.
Here is the link of my final prototype
Self Reflection
I am proud that I could eventually finish a prototype and share my work here. There is a lot of room for improvement in my work and I hope that the skill and knowledge I learnt in this course could help me become a better designer in the future!
