Finding Time and Scheduling Easily

I always wondered if there’s an way of easily manage and schedule our daily activities. I had a lot of apps people use in my mind, but none seem simple enough.

I started observing different people doing different scheduling tasks. And, for my surprise, they all did it so differently from one another!

There was one that even resorted to post-its. This really made me curious with what it could influence in my project. It really puzzled me! :)

From the other observations, it caught my attention a person that used the phone a lot to talk to clients, suppliers, family, etc. and, at the same time, uses the phone calendar to schedule things.

How could I help him to quickly check the calendar, schedule activities, all with ongoing calls?

Well, I went in search of inspiration… And did my first prototype with a FIND TIME feature to help to quickly find free time to schedule activities.

I though I had done a nice work. The screens seemed simple, the navigation clear, and the right information at the right time.

But guess what? After the Heuristic Evaluation from my peers, I realized that I had too many screens and the navigation was not good.

Well, back to the board again! And it was amazing! I realized that the solution could be much simpler and done on a single screen.

I was really happy to have simplified so much. And it made sense.

At this point we were asked to make a plan and a navigation skeleton!

The plan was hard to do. I had to check each of the future assignments to understand the work I had ahead of me. And it was not clear at all…

To balance the shock with the plan, I had the skeleton that was fun and provided me more ideas and improvements. I was happy with what I was getting in my app prototype.

At this point we had to hear from people. We started in-person testing!

I had my app prototype built on a platform (the OutSystems platform) that allowed me to prototype and implement at the same. So, I had the app prototype up and running in a smartphone. Amazing!

Seeing people using the app in front of me was fantastic. They didn’t do what I was expecting, tough they managed to do the tasks. And again, it was a source of great ideas for improvements. :)

The next challenge was testing but this time online. I was really curious how I would run the tests… I knew what tasks I wanted users to perform, but creating the tests was not easy. It was complex and instructions were not clear. I felt I was not creating a good test. Nevertheless, it allowed me to get more feedback, more insights, and more improvements. :)

At this point, with the app with much improvements and running well, with great feedback, I decided to definitely baptize my app as MyDay.

At this point I got surprised by the feedback of the online tests, the app was very easy to use, and they loved the FIND TIME feature, saying things like “SUPER AWESOME” and “BRILLIANT”. Then, I showed to friends and one of them even told me to copyright the idea!!! How awesome can this be?

And now, to finish. Remember the post-its I talked about at the start of this post? Well, I remembered them because I had to highlight the free slots of time when using FIND TIME. I remembered the yellow of the post-its and it works very well! Surprise! Surprise!

And this was my journey! I’m happy with it! :)