Designing “Space Case”- A productivity app
Brief
For my 10 week capstone project in Coursera’s Interaction Design Specialization, I chose to design an interface that facilitates personal or social behavior change.
My Role
Since this was a capstone project through Coursera, I was responsible for the entire project. This included, research, wire framing, mapping, A/B testing, heuristic evaluations, creating art assets, usability testing, creating a pixel perfect mock up, and prototyping.
Research
I completed my need finding through user observation. I wanted to distinguish pain points that user’s have in regards to focusing on work/school related tasks. I observed 5 people in a work setting as well as 2 people at home trying to study for school. I had no prompts for the participants and conducted observational research as they worked.
Ideation
As a result of the observations, I wanted to focus on changing the way people structure their workflow to offer less distractions from their phone notifications.I knew that one of my biggest challenges would be to narrow down my ideas and focus on a solution to the brief that would allow me to create a high fidelity mock-up within the course duration.
“How do I get people to focus on their tasks and avoid distractions.”
I had used productivity apps in the past when I was in school and I found the pomodoro technique very helpful. The theory is that, if you chunk together periods of work, followed by quick periods of break, it should keep you more engaged for a longer duration of time overall. My goal was to create a functional pomodoro app while introducing something unique and engaging to the genre:
- To increase productivity while using the app by decreasing the amount of time spent on “time wasting” activities
- To figure out a system to not only retain users but to incentivize them with a rewarding interface
- To introduce something fun that encourages productivity
My Proposal
I love 8-bit games. The aesthetics are clean and recognizable. A lot of people recognize the theme. This gave me a base for the tone that I wanted the app to present.
Space Case is a productivity timer. During use, the application will overlay an animation of your ship traveling through space. This overlay will block the use of “time wasting” apps and websites (the list is fully customizable by the user). After completing certain milestones within the application, the user will be rewarded with ship upgrades, new animations, etc.
Design
I ran into some difficulty during my first round of usability testing while the app was still a paper prototype. People were confused because I had over complicated the reward system. I had also put too many things to do inside the app that detracted from it’s main focus of keeping the user on task.
After heuristic evaluation with some of my peers in the course, I decided to strip most of the elements down and focus on making it a productivity timer first and foremost.
I still wanted it to be fun. A lot of productivity timers that I have used deliberately skip out on any user engagement and focus on being a timer. I wanted to introduce rewards, and animations, to try and create something engaging and practical. I wanted to offer an experience that would keep them using the app and show that they were achieving goals. After a second paper prototype with very basic art assets, I realized that I could create more complex sprites and decided to add some more color and vibrancy.
After at least three paper iterations, I was happy with the way the prototype looked and functioned. I conducted A/B user testing with https://www.usertesting.com/. I wanted to see whether or not people needed the help icon on the front page to explain the purpose of the app or if I could hide it in the settings tab to keep the aesthetics clean. Most of the participants were able to grasp the concept of the application without explanation even if they had never used a productivity timer before. All of the users preferred the original model so I kept the prototype as is.
Takeaways
I come from a psychology background so focusing on problem solving and user driven development felt very familiar to me. Even though I had to scrap a lot of the ideas from the paper prototyping and wire framing stage, I enjoyed coming up with new design elements that were practical and in keeping with the theme.
I felt like creating multiple iterations and then having to narrow my focus down for practical purposes was an important learning moment for me.
The project was a challenging experience in creating something practical while incorporating some unique features. From time to time I’ll dive back into the project and work on improving the sprites or refining theme of the app. I think that it’s good practice for me to keep coming back to a project that I had a limited amount of time to work on, and see how my design ideas have changed.
Thank You for reading!
Link to my functional prototype here: https://invis.io/UAJKBX5QCHP
