Do you want to get off work earlier?
Today we spent too many hours at the office and that leaves us very little free time. But you can change it! Start using Focus! to help you organize and prioritize your job tasks so you can be more efficient and work less hours
I have been doing the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) course at Coursera for the best part of the last year. The brief I chose for my Capstone project was Change: design an app that help people to change their habits and get their life goals.
I had two different ideas about an app to fulfill this brief:
- one about helping people organize at their jobs
- the other about helping people set one goal they would want to achieve.
The first thing I needed was to get some information as a base to work for. With this in mind I made some investigation to know how people work, manage their tasks, when and why they are delayed…
I observed three different participants at they workstations for some time and asked them about their kind of job, how do they decide which task to do and which will have to wait, which channels they received new tasks to do or changes in the existing ones, if they made their assigned working hours or not and why they think that happen, how this affected them with the rest of their lifes, if they work at home out of working hours and how often, how much free time they have…
With all these facts in mind I started to think of an app that will help people organize at work. To enrich the process and to see if it has any sense I made a benchmark and I searched for inspiration in related apps.
The result were two different storyboards with different point of view about the same problem and I designed tow paper wireframes with a possible solution
Then I made two storyboards with different point of view about the same problem, and I designed two paper wireframe and two paper prototypes with a possible solution.
The next step consisted in a Heuristic Evaluation of my prototypes, which I got with the help of my fellow students at the HCI Coursera course. With this evaluation and a different point of view I got a lot of feedback of what could work and what problems my inicial design could have (I think another heuristic evaluation with a more Hi-Fi prototype would have been very useful)
With all this information I chose the first approach and help people organize at their jobs, because I think that the main factor that keeps us away form getting our goals is that we spent too much time at the office. You all know about it: we have multiple tasks to do, some of them at the same time and always with a tight deadline. So I asked myself if an app would be able to help you get off work earlier, so you can pursuit your real life goals. And this is how Focus! was born.
I made a list of changes in the prototype I have chosen and create a development plan. This will help me to keep track of the progress building the app.
I started the digital design with the knowledge acquired from previous steps, and built an interactive prototype with InVision, so it can be tested by other people.
I run the first tests with people of my environment (guerrilla test). I asked them to achieve some tasks on the prototype and managed to find some pain points where users didn’t know how to perform the tasks.
After this guerrilla tests and based on the problems found, I designed and alternative and run a A/B test using UserTesting to compare both solutions and find out which one worked better.
It was a new and enriching experience and I got tons of feedback that help me find, once I had analyzed all the info, a way to fix the problems.
All this work and learning for about a year could be summarized with the final video of the project.
I hope you enjoyed the reading.
Thanks for your time.
Best!
