Coursera UX Class: myAssistant mobile app

The idea for the myAssistant app came to me during some interviews and observations I did with some of my co-workers. I asked them about time, what they did in the mornings first thing, and what they did before bed in regards to their mobile devices. I am a bit of a control freak when it comes to my mobile phone and my constant desire to find a good way to manage my schedule and tasks more effectively. I thought it was interesting that many of my colleagues also were slaves to their devices — checking them first thing in the morning to see what the day held, but easily getting sidetracked in to social media, news feeds, and the like. I thought, what could I do to allow people to check schedules but not get sucked in to the other time wasters?

I started out with some brainstorming to think through what could be in an app like that. What would keep in in the app and not trail off in to the other noise? What if I didn’t even have to look at the app, and it could read my schedule to me while I was getting ready for the day? No more wasting time reading — instead I could get ready and send voice commands to the app. What would the app need to support something like that?

I took the idea and sketched it out on paper.

Once I got it on paper, I gathered some feedback from others in my class and colleagues to see what improvements could be made. I got some great feedback about the categories and what didn’t make sense, some ideas about what additional functions might work in the task and schedule area. Based on those comments, I started creating an online version of the prototype, applying a look & feel and fleshing out the functionality.

We started with a few rounds of in-person feedback testing to understand some of the flows and see where the hiccups were. There was still more confusion around the sections on the home page and where users could go to update their profile, and what the action buttons were actually doing on the Task page. Based on some of the feedback there, I went in to A/B Testing, where I tested a few varieties of what opened a User Profile and what action buttons were called in the New Task Page.

Based on those test results, I decided that most users expected to see the User Profiles under the Gear icon and the new Task buttons were the most effective.

People really liked the idea of the voice over for the schedule. Ultimately, it would be great to incorporate more voice commands to further promote not having to interact with any else on your mobile device.

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