Can activity tracking actually be useful?
How I designed an app to help balance my life more effectively
Sometimes it’s hard to find a balance in our lives between our working tasks and the fun things we love to do. Am I exercising enough? When was the last time I practiced guitar? How much time am I working? GO is designed to help visualize the complexity of your everyday life, helping you make positive changes and spot patterns you wouldn’t otherwise be able to see on your own.
The concept for this application stemmed out of my own desire to visualize my activity and achieve a more balanced lifestyle. Previous attempts to juggle the competing activities in my life failed me; there were things I needed to do, and things I wanted to do. I didn’t have time for either. Or at least I thought I didn’t.
User Research
After outlining some key features, I began doing user research amongst family and peers to gather feedback and confirm I wasn’t alone.
How do you manage your time? What distracts you the most? What is most frustrating about juggling many activities?
Here are a few key points that people reiterated:
- I never have enough time to do X
- I don’t want to invest a lot of time using an app to help me manage my time
- I want a way to be held accountable for my goals
The app needed to go beyond tracking and passively displaying personal data by actively encouraging and reminding users about their activities, holding them accountable for goals, and making meeting those goals a rewarding experience.
Requirements
After reviewing my flurry of notes, I distilled the sentiments into three general requirements:
Speed: The timing/tracking aspect of the application had to be as fast and as frictionless as possible. If people were going invest time and mental energy into using the app in order to gain from it’s data visualization and reminders, the time spent to track in the first place had to be incredibly quick.
Accountability: I spoke with some people that had experience with life balance workshops and techniques, specifically about behavior change. I learned that simply displaying data is not enough to change behavior. This piece of advice radically changed how I thought about the application’s focus. Reminders in the form of carefully phrased notifications would be necessary to hold people accountable for the goals they set.
Flexibility: It had to be flexible. Some users preferred in the moment recording, while others wanted to document their activities at the end of the day. It had to allow for tracking of multiple activities across multiple categories over different time spans.
Wireframing & Prototyping
I soon began sketching prototypes with these goals in mind. I went through several iterations of each page design, but spent a lot of time iterating on the home screen where tracking would occur.
For the Data tab, I began with the idea of circular pie charts that could be zoomed into to show more detail. This fulfilled the concept of quick viewing of data quickly, only becoming more detailed if the user chooses.
After testing wireframes with friends and family, I started putting screens together in Sketch and prototyping flows using Invision.
After working out the user flow, I began experimenting with microinteractions using Framer and Flinto for Mac. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. I used Framer to experiment with a blurred overlay effect on the timer page, an effect you can play with here.
Flinto allowed me to easily prototype the entire app flow, in addition to designing the animations and microinteractions that help make sense of the content and the UI.
It’s never done
More testing is needed to see if an app like this can actually be useful in the real world. Regardless, the process taught me a lot about how people think about time management and exposed me to the value of prototyping through multiple levels of fidelity. We are living in a renaissance of rapidly developing digital tools that are enabling designers to do some incredible things. I can’t wait to see what the future holds.
Thank you for reading! Let me know what experiences you’ve had with tracking your time given the current set of available tools. Can it be helpful? In what contexts? I’m convinced we will get there, but only once most of it can be done passively.
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