Sharing Life’s Events: How Shareful Can Bring People Together

Like most mobile app solutions, mine started with a hypothesis. Everybody has stuff they need to get done and goals they want to attain, but tend to “go it alone” by default. I believed that if people had a way to share tasks and goals with others, they would be able to get more done and find greater satisfaction in the task because they involved their loved ones.
There are a lot of checklist apps, even ones that let you share tasks with others, but they are pretty straightforward. There’s an item, and you check it off when you’re done. It seemed that they lacked the big picture point of view of what the tasks are a part of. I also had a hunch that not everyone uses these apps.
I began my research by interviewing people to find out how they managed daily tasks. I wanted to find out what things were important to them and how they set priorities. I wanted to observe the tools they used and, especially, to discover whether they were mainly digital, like mobile apps, or analog, like pen and paper.
Watching people gave me deep insights into how people manage their lives. I saw them use everything from digital apps to pen and paper, to sticky notes, to even writing reminders on their hand! The tools were all over the place. I noted a common theme, however. Many people rely on loved ones to help them keep it all straight.

Most people are actually pretty good at designing and utilizing their own methods for managing daily activities. The bigger challenge seemed to happen when there was a unique event coming up — something outside of the normal routine. Keeping track of the details, when the event would take place, who would be there, what needed to be done or brought to the event — these things are more overwhelming because they don’t happen all the time — that is, unless you are an event coordinator.
It can also be a challenge to advertise the event to people — especially if you want to keep it exclusive to just a few.
I decided to pivot from my initial ideas about task-sharing and focus, instead, on sharing events. The events could, perhaps, have tasks related to them, but the event itself would be the star of the show.
My next step was to place some ideas on a storyboard. Using two different concepts, I drew panels showing how my key audience might interact with an app to help them share an event or a task related to an event.

After creating the storyboard, it was time to actually sketch out what this might look like if it was a mobile app. This process involved two items — paper and a Sharpie. In the UX world, this is called Paper Prototyping and is really quite fun.

Before doing any actual digital design work, I tested the paper prototypes on a couple of people, making sure the concepts were easy to understand, and noting any major usability flaws or missing features. I learned quickly that the concept of sharing Goals vs. sharing Events, was a bit too vague. Users want simplicity and models that they currently understand. I decided to axe the “Goals” part of the app from the initial requirements.
With a pretty good understanding of what this app should do, I created a rough digital Prototype, at first using Sketch and InVision. Basic navigation is easy to test using these tools and helped me see how the interaction flow should be handled.

Testing actual interactions, however, is not easy to do with a tool like InVision. I sought out something more advanced and stumbled on to Justinmind — a prototyping tool that gives you a wide range of interaction capabilities. It was a steep learning curve, but I managed to get something ready for actual testing within a week.
Doing usability testing is a huge part of the design process. I think I’ve always known that, but there is a certain amount of rigor and grunt-work that goes into it. Once I had something ready for usability testing, I recruited a couple of people to test my prototype using their own mobile phones. During this process, I noticed some issues I hadn’t seen before.

Users were expecting better feedback after creating an event. Feedback seems to be a critical part of any interaction since it gives users a sense of closure to the activity.
Back to the drawing board, I picked a specific screen to improve so that I could put it through an A/B test to find out if my changes would be received well by users.
I chose to change the home screen where all events showed up. I added a section for Recently Added events, so that people could easily see and access the event they just added.
With UserTesting.com, I was able to run the actual A/B test. UserTesting.com allows you to share your prototype with real users and have them do a series of tasks that you define within your design. The sessions are recorded so you can watch them later and see where the design has any major flaws.
This process is both fascinating and humbling. I couldn’t help but to feel a twinge of angst as I saw people taking pathways in the app that weren’t fully functional or weren’t set up to allow them freedom to click on whatever they wanted.

Ultimately, both versions of my home screen performed equally well in that all users were able to find the event they’d just added. The screen that had the Recently Added events section, however, showed slightly better performance in that people found the event much more quickly.
At the end of the testing sessions, I made a few changes to the interaction flow. Most notably, I added a screen that gave the user confirmation that an event had been added and shared (if they’d chosen to share it).

Somewhere along the way, I started calling the app Shareful. I’d love for people to think there was a clever and strategically thought-out reason for this. The fact is, I was trying to find something that wasn’t already used in the App Store.
Shareful is a simple app prototype that is currently focused on doing one thing really well — allowing people to create and share events with other people. While there may be other apps out there that do something similar, Shareful is focused on making these events personal. By keeping the feature set simple and the ability to add other users as needed (no initial, massive import of contacts), it encourages users to focus on the person, rather than the event.

I also believe there are future opportunities to expand the feature set of Shareful. I’d love to add in the concept of a task list related to the event, for those who need to collaborate on making the event, whether large or small, a success. I’d like to revisit the idea of sharing personal goals so that loved ones can see what kinds of things you are trying to accomplish in the next year and support you in that.
The initial “hook” of getting people in to do something simple, create and share an event, will hopefully make any added features a bonus. I believe that if people had more effective ways to share their moments with loved ones, they would, indeed, get more done and find greater fulfillment in life.
