How we created an app that makes life easier for the paranoid

Paranoid people, people with OCD, and just people with a hole in their head like me. We tried ❤

Hi 👋🏻
I’ve been a product designer for quite some time now and I’m actively looking for ideas for my own product. And, as is often the case, everything we need is right under our noses. That’s how I came up with an idea that’s been hovering in the air for a long time 😄

Looking ahead, you can download the app here, and here we also have landing 🙈

What’s da problem?

Imagine that you have a train today. The day before departure, you write a list of what you need to take with you, what you need to do, to not forget anything. You pack everything, and before you leave, you carefully double-check whether you forgot to turn something off or close it. And so, everything seems to be checked out, everything is fine, you’re good to go. You slam the doors, get in a cab, and go to the train station.

Everything looks great, doesn’t it? And then, bam, there’s that stupid thought: “Did I turn off the iron?” or “Did I close the door? Endless trying to remember, frantic calls to neighbors/friends/relatives, and this whole thing begins. Not cool.

There are a lot of solutions to this problem, from the simplest, like taking a video or doing something unusual (like patting yourself on the cheeks) to remember exactly. And ending with the most high-tech: surveillance cameras, smart locks, etc.

All these methods are effective in their own way, but, if for the first enough just not to forget, then the latter require a tangible financial investment, which not everyone is ready for.

So, what the idea?

The idea is simple as the world — a checklist app with a few tweaks 🙈

Flow is simple to the point of impossibility, follow my hands:

• On onboarding, you give you access to notifications and geolocation tracking. That’s also where you set up your home. No deal with the FBI, so no data to sell, it doesn’t go anywhere, you don’t have to worry. Everything that happened in the Locked.app stays in the Locked.app 😏
• After that, you create a switch for each activity. For example with me it’s doors, windows, lights, and the boiler.
• Finally, when you’re still checking it all before you go out, just mark it in the app, it’s easy ✨

Yeah, spread out. If it was that easy, people would just use reminders.

Don’t forget about edge-cases

When you first start using an app, it’s a new experience for you. So you’re unlikely to forget to switch the toggle. But when it becomes part of your daily routine, you will forget about it. That’s the main problem.

I solved it rather trivially. The app simply tracks your geolocation in the background to notify you when you leave the house. That way there’s a lot less chance of forgetting toggle. When you get home, all the toggles turn off by themselves.

There’s also a pretty sensitive point about privacy. If someone were to intercept data about you not being home and maybe forgetting to close the door, it would be unpleasant at the very least. So for now, I’m not ready to offer any sync or anything like that, because I find it insecure.

Another edge case is couriers. If you work as a courier or for any other reason you might drive past your house during the day — the app will disable toggles and you’ll have to turn them on again. To avoid this — you can disable auto-off in the settings. It was the simplest solution possible, and the simplest is often the best 😁

So, how it was?

It all started one more time when I was walking up to the fifth floor, cursing to myself, to check if I had locked the doors 🙈.

Then I decided it was time to put an end to it, because I was really sick of it.
In my head was born quickly the basic concept of what and how I can do, and then, over a cup of coffee my friend and I outlined it all in more detail, developed roadmap and took it all to work. At the end we had 1.5 designers, 0 developers and infinity of desire and aspiration.

We started with a trivial questionnaire, which we distributed to everyone we could get to collect some basic analytics.

It turned out that the problem seem to be relevant to everyone who took part in the survey. So we decided that it was worth a try.

We assembled and tested several prototypes. To save time, we also tested design concepts. In the end, we came up with something similar to what we ended up with:

And then what? And then code…

I delayed this moment as long as I could, but I had to start coding the whole thing. Since the budget of the project was severely limited by a round zero, I decided that I would write it myself. Originally I considered Flutter, but after rechecking it, I realized, that it would be difficult to implement background tracking of geolocation. There was a ready-made module, which was easily adjustable, but it cost money, which, as we remember, we don’t have.

I decided that Swift would be the best choice for the task, especially since I had heard about the simplicity and ease of the SwiftUI.

Of course, because I had had almost no coding experience the code consisted of 90% crutches, pulled out from various YouTube guides, StackOverflow and other resources, and 10% of my own crutches, which I developed to combine all this.

It turned out surprisingly well. You can personally test the results by downloading the application via this link. Don’t hesitate to leave your honest feedback, we will improve it 😄

And a little bit about future plans

Now I don’t have time to develop the app at all, unfortunately. There are already a lot of features in my mind, but right now, to be honest, my priorities are a bit different. The app will be updated, the app will live, because it does the main thing — it solves the problem.

After publishing it on reddit and in various design communities I got a lot of feedback (not always positive, of course) saying that the app is useless, that there are a lot of ads and so on. Some of the feedback was accepted and I already implemented an option to turn off ads for money and cut it a little bit (well c’mon, I need at least to payback my dev account 😄). I let some of it pass me by because apparently not all the comments make sense.

And again, you can download the application here, and don’t forget about the landing 🙈

I hope to get some feedback from you too, to see if it even makes sense to develop Locked.app any further, or just leave it as is)