GoalGetter! Capstone project for the Coursera HCI Specialization.

Goal Getter is the one place to manage all your goals for the year, month, week and right now! Their are a thousand to do apps in the world, but none that keep your longer term goals and life’s priorities in line with what needs to get done today. If you’re not assigning your life’s goals in your ever growing to do list. They’re not getting done. In a fragmented world, the GoalGetter gets it!

View the prototype here.

How do you make sure you schedule time to write that novel, prototype your invention or create a strong family bond? All while managing your daily responsibilities at home, in your community and at work. If you’re like me and you don’t schedule it or write it down. It doesn’t get done.

For the past year or so I’ve participated in the Coursera Interaction Design Specialization given by the University of California San Diego. The course focuses on Design Thinking, Human Centered Design principles, User Research, Prototyping and more. It’s been a very rewarding experience and grounded my previous experiences in design with a more human centered design focus. I’ve been working as a UX/UI developer for many years now, but am mostly self taught. So I wanted to get back to basics and learn some of the things I may have missed in my self education. The finale for the course is the capstone project designed by the founders of Instagram. The project asks you to solve for one of three themes. Time, Change or Glance. I chose to focus on time, though my project is really a combination of all three themes. It’s a TIME management planner which will help you CHANGE your daily routines and provides all your life’s goals at a GLANCE.

Meet GoalGetter! A single app to keep track of your life’s mission, your yearly, monthly, weekly and daily goals separated by your life’s priorities. The app uses popular concepts from other productivity processes I’ve tried to incorporate into my life. I drew inspiration from Zig Ziglar’s Wheel of Life, from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits, from David Allen’s GettingThingsDone and the ActionMethod to name a few.

My goal of this app is to first 1.) break your life into priorities. 2.) Create a life’s vision or mission statement. 3.) Plan your highest level life’s goals and then get more granular. 4.) Plan your yearly goals by creating tasks that lead to achieving your life’s vision. Also in your yearly goals will be your work assignments, and anything else you deem important enough to track throughout the year. Once you have your yearly goals determined. It makes planning each month much easier. 5.) Simply break down your yearly goals into smaller milestones and assign those to your monthly list. 6.) Then break them down even further to your weekly plan and lastly they are distilled into the the smallest possible tasks. 7.) Your daily To Do items.

My process for creating GoalGetter.

• User Research: I started off my project by doing some needfinding and interviewing. I observed many of my neighbors and work colleagues and their processes for keeping track of their goals and tasks. In my research, I found most users I interviewed and interacted with have no way of managing their life’s goals. They get work assignments handed to them by their employer and they plan no further than a day or week in advance. Most only partially use the calendars on their phones, hand written notes and software dictated by their employer. This has been a problem I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. In my own life, I keep lists on notepads for work, in evernote, wunderlist, in trello for freelance jobs, google docs, I share a calendar on my phone with my wife, I share an outlook calendar with colleagues and we manage all our sprint tasks in TFS for the software we are building. On top of that I have to plan very specific performance goals on a yearly basis for my employer logged in their system. To say that this process is fragmented would be an understatement.

• Ideation: Storyboarding is not a activity I take part in much in my daily work. It was a lot of fun to quickly sketch the problem of what your app is trying to solve. It also really helps you nail down a purpose quickly and begin to tell a story. I started the design of the app by creating a paper prototype which is another process I don’t use often. Since I’ve been working with the Adobe suite for over 15 years, I usually jump directly to design on screen. I absolutely loved this process and will incorporate this method for everything I design from now on.

• Heuristic Review: This was an eye opener. I don’t get the opportunity to conduct heuristic reviews on the products I work on as I’m usually redesigning a system that been in place for a while. We conducted tests via skype which was a little difficult but the process brought up so many major flaws that I did not notice and saved me a lot of time of redesigning the actual product by getting to these before I started work on a functional prototype. It also made me rethink some of the major design features. In the process of this course it also helped me to trim down the feature set I was looking to build and focus on the MVP items.

• Wire-framing: Probably the most important step in the process for me. This helped me solidify exactly what I was building and iron out some of the interaction details.

• Testing the Wireframe: Seeing users test your product for the first time is a cringe worthy experience. Luckily, the tests went pretty well and were absolutely essential to getting me to where I am now.

• High Fidelity Prototyping: This is where I perform my best and where I am most at home. Having gone through the paper prototyping, heuristic review and wireframe testing, this portion was a breeze.

• Testing the Prototype: This was the first time I’ve used the website usertesting.com and was blown away. The level of feedback I received was fantastic. It was quite insightful to watch users who have no previous knowledge of your app walk through it and discuss what they are thinking why they are clicking where they are. The feedback was incredibly valuable.

UserTesting.com

• Launch: Now the next step is to build this app. I have the capabilities to design and build the front end, but will need to bring in a back end developer to help with the database and more technical work. The app still needs a ton more work in design and testing. Since it will require a lot of entry by the end user, I want to make sure it is as efficient as possible in adding tasks. I plan to include input through voice, pulling data from other calendars and task managers, digital translation of hand written notes and other input devices. So I’m really I’m a long way from launch, but I think I have a pretty solid foundation thus far. I’ve received a lot of great feedback from my classmates and the anonymous users I’ve tested seemed to really get the concept and what I’m trying to do with it.

You can test out GoalGetter yourself right here. Just remember it is just a prototype and has a long way to go. You’ll be seeing it in early 2018! Reach out to me if you’d like updates.

Thanks for watching!
TM