Intent

A little over 2 months ago a number of students, along with myself embarked on the capstone course for Interaction Design on Coursera. This multi-week course had us exercising both familiar (covered in previous courses) and new strategies in coming up with human-centered digital product solutions.

Brief

Each of us were given a set of design briefs to work against, the topics ranging from social behavior change to personal dashboard. One in particular stood out to me: redesign the way we experience or interact with time.

Time as a finite, equally distributed resource has fascinated me for a while, so naturally it was a good fit. I set off to learn more about time, people’s relationship to it, and how we might look at this precious resource in a slightly different way.

Discovery

I began my research by doing an empathetic deep-dive of need finding, where I set out to explore the motivations, behaviors and potential pain points that people encounter in their relationship with time. I preformed a series of interviews, public intercepts and ethnographic studies to get a better feel for how people move through their days.

During my research I found a number of trends however, a constant that appeared from all participants was a desire to make better, more effective use of the time they did have.

a constant that appeared from all participants was a desire to make better, more effective use of the time they did have.

Some people used calendars on their phones, others used crude Post-it note techniques, but all did so in an effort to keep on track as they moved through their day. Often they did so to open up free time to spend with friends or loved ones — meaning their was a deep motivation to stay on track.

Inspiration

Working with the findings from my field research, I encoded my learnings in story boards from which I hoped to find some inspiration and opportunities by pulling back to a higher view of the challenge. Using an affinity mapping technique in conjunction with brainstorming ideas, I was able to come to a number of possible problem statements to go after. These ranged from, “People need help optimizing their schedule” to “people need ways to celebrate the time they have”. Along with this list of possible directions, I pulled together inspirational examples of how other products are interacting with time, from Apple’s Inhale watch app to Nike’s Run Club. These examples showed great creativity in the way that designers are tackling this challenge.

Point of View

Based on all of the research and inspiration, I created a point of view, from which I would make product decisions and build off of, here is the point of view I used in my work:

Time is our most precious, non-renewable resource that we have. With it, we have the power to great things if we can learn to wield it effectively. Too many of us find out too late that it is already later than we think — and that while we all have the chance to use our time to do good things, few actually structure their time to do so.

How might we instead learn to channel, celebrate and use time to do more of the good it was intended for? Using our belief that time is a resource and tool, we move toward a place where we don’t passively experience time, but rather use it — to be learned from and leveraged actively to help us live our best life. Learning to structure and celebrate the time we have opens us all to great possibly.

Ideation

With my new direction in hand, I set out to explore some of the ideas I came up with previously. I used storyboarding and low-fidelity paper prototyping techniques to quickly and iteratively explore a number of potential solutions quickly. I found storyboarding to be exceptionally useful in nailing the big moments, while the paper-prototyping allowed me to quickly flesh out a “working” UI. I leveraged my roommates to help me quickly find and diagnose problems.

By this point I had narrowed my way down to two directions. The first direction was a concept called Intent and the second was called Trakr. The concepts were relatively simple.

Intent was designed to help people set and keep intentions for their day, while Trakr was designed to help people keep track of things (anything) they felt was important, using a simple counter. Both of the ideas, were targeted at helping people make better choices with their time through mindfulness of their objectives, goals and things that are important to them.

Both of the ideas, were targeted at helping people make better choices with their time through mindfulness of their objectives, goals and things that are important to them.

Peer Evaluation

At this point, I took my prototypes to other people in the class to provide their feedback on my paper prototype application. Unfortunately, there was an issue with the sharing service, so instead I asked my roommates to follow the N&N heuristics guidelines and provide feedback. While they did this, I sought out applications where I could preform a similar analysis to see if I could get fresh eyes on my ideas.

This plan worked great, and I walked away with all kinds of changes that both my roommates and I spotted following the review. A couple of these included:

• Don’t allow for goal to be submitted until complete — provide clear error state if more is required.
• Provide faster ways of getting back to the home screen.
• Provide a clearer pattern to help users recognize it as a toggle element, or provide more thorough on boarding.

Though most of the issues were small, it would have been death from a thousand cuts had they not been found. From these changes came a simpler, more focused set of ideas and a much clearer idea of the value proposition.

Wireframes

The next step was to wireframe the winning paper prototypes (with aforementioned changes) in a higher fidelity. In this way we could start to fine tune some of the interactions and play with some UI elements.

In wiring the interfaces, I found even more streamlining options available and ways to keep the applications more consistent through the usage of UI patterns. These wireframes were then used to create a detailed implementation plan and prototypes using InVision which I then tested with users.

Decisions, decisions…

At this point we had to make a difficult choice: what idea would we continue using and which would we leave for now?

Based on the feedback received in usability testing, I decided to continue forward with Intent, as it married an unmet need from users to be more intentional with their time and an interest in positive psychology that I have. I wondered, could an application help people make better decisions about their time, if they actually thought about how they wanted to use it?

With this decision made, the next step was to further improve the application prototype based on more testing, and prepare a more thorough testing protocol which people would be asked to interact with online.

Using InVision again, I put together a higher-fidelity prototype and ran through it a handful of times to make sure everything was working.

In-Person Testing

I launched my in-person test looking to find the answer to a couple of questions I still had about my app:

• Will users understand the purpose of the app?
• Will users we able to successfully add a day’s worth of intents?
• Will users understand the basic navigation of the app? Does it make sense
• What time of day would users be most likely to use the application?
• Will users be likely to review their intents throughout the day?

I wrote a quick screener and a set of tasks for users to complete using the prototype. These tasks ranged from adding “intents” to reviewing them. I covered the desired interaction and core functionality of each screen, as well as exploring the users feelings about the app an using it.

“It seems like a motivational app — I think there’s a lot of negativity in the world today, to have periodic goals throughout the day is a good thing.”

I got a lot of great feedback from the in-person testing, and found most pressingly that I would have to make some additional simplification in the way that I would present the intents to users — as some people were still getting hung up on basic navigation. My hypothesis was, if I could simplify the number of options on the screen at one time that I could help users get through the intent setting process more quickly and easily.

Online Testing

With a fresh coat of paint, I launched a similar, but different test on UserTesting.com which required people to interact with the new version of the prototype and provide their feedback.

I was presently surprised to find that most of the users “got” the purpose of the application and seemed to be able to make clear use of most of the functionality— simplifying and re-simplifying had certainly paid off.

Most of the requested changes from users came in the form of UI polish and the visibility of some elements. Others wanted to extend the value of the application by being able to set their own prompts. All-in-all I walked away with a number of changes which I would use in the final bit of polish.

Intent

The final version of the concept came to life in a simple, yet powerful interface which provides what I set out to do: create a product which would allow people to live more thoughtfully, by being more thoughtful about the way they think about their day.

The single-card layout, simplified navigation structure and contrast-y colors helped to more quickly orient users and reduced many of the issues I found in previous tests.

Through the process, I learned the value of testing early and often, the value of asking a lot of questions, challenging your assumptions and the power of iteration.

Thanks Professor Klemmer, class & Coursera!