UX learnings from the best productivity apps
Some apps create the best of user experience with the help of appealing visual and interaction design. Some others thrive on minimal interface. The following apps include both kinds.
Let’s unpack the best of UX in the best of productivity apps out there.
Around—Recognizing unmet needs
All the existing meeting tools like Google Meet, Zoom, Skype, etc. work as a ‘next best’ option for in-person meetings. Teams don’t need a replacement for physical meetings anymore. They need a solution for the new way of working together remotely.
Around is the new video calling app that recognizes this need. It facilitates the best collaboration digitally and gets out of the way.
It does so by ironing out everything that makes online meetings a pain. The audio noise around you (like the dog barking, kids screaming, washing machine running, etc.) is minimized. So is the visual noise — You don’t need to worry about exposing your bedroom background, a messy shelf, or your partner working on the couch behind you.
During the meeting, your face shows up inside a small, avatar style circle. Their signature filters cast a cool vibe on your face. Even if you are having a bad hair day, it won’t show! The use of technology isn’t limited to aesthetics. Their AI-based framing makes sure the camera stays on your face even if you tilt your head or nod.
Unlike other tools, presenting and switching between screens is effortless during the meeting.
Reducing friction on all these levels ensures that teams can focus on what matters most — work.
A great product is designed keeping the high expectation customer in mind. Around is ideal for design sessions, brainstorms, and code reviews. Their high expectation customers are the creative teams and that’s brilliant! If a meeting tool can help creative teams collaborate with ease, it can definitely work well for all the ‘typical’ meetings.
Elevate—Personalizing and gamifying user progress
It’s a brain-training app that helps users improve their writing, listening, speaking, reading, and math. And it does so with the most appealing visuals, interactions, and feedback. Apple named it the best app of the year in 2014, the same year it was launched.
A great user experience of an app starts with the right onboarding. Elevate does that by offering a clear value proposition, personalized brain training. A fun, 4-min quiz discovers user needs and level, and creates a personalized training plan. Training includes playing games from their 35+ collection.
I have been using Elevate for few years now and reaping its benefits. So when I moved my kids to homeschooling early this year, it was a no brainer to include it in our learning toolkit. Both my kids, 9 and 12 enjoy their daily 15-min sessions on various mental math, vocabulary building, and comprehension activities among others.
Elevate brilliantly gamifies learning. e.g., An interesting visual marks the completion of a game — individual edges coming together for the formation of a hexagon. If you didn’t do well, one or two edges fail to appear. There’s something about that unfinished job. It’s unsettling to the human mind. It’s an open challenge that you want to beat. I bet 9 out of 10 times, you’d want to try again to improve your score.
These gamification teasers are sprinkled throughout the app — Join all pieces of an origami puzzle, viz. improve brevity. Sail the little boat across the river viz. learn the nuances of syntax, and so on.
This design doesn’t just provide immediate delight. It helps users push a little harder each time to keep getting better. No wonder they call it the personal trainer for your brain.
Notion—Offering minimal UI, maximum capability
This tool is designed to be an all-in-one workplace for your notes, tasks, journal writing, planners, reminders, to-do lists, calendars, habit trackers, databases, etc. It’s note taking ++ and beyond!
Anticipating user needs, Notion provides dozens of free templates ranging from meeting notes to roadmaps to thesis planning.
Unlike other apps in this list, Notion doesn’t include fancy aesthetics or interactions. The strength of its UX lies in simplifying the complicated.
Notion brilliantly removes the typical categorization of our lives into personal and professional stuff. Merging the two is a powerful offering. You can plan a marketing campaign as well as a family travel in the same workspace. Everything is as separate or as connected as you want it to be. You can link documents within documents, create databases within databases, share it with others, or keep things private.
In spite of being so powerful, Notion has a minimal interface. None of the features shout for user’s attention. You discover and learn its capabilities as and when you need them.
I use Notion for writing articles, creating to-do lists, maintaining client list, creating content calendar, jotting down random thoughts and ideas, writing book summaries, saving recipes, tracking homeschooling projects, journaling, and so on.
If you use Notion like I do, you would see a glimpse of your life in front of your eyes in writing. Avid users of the tool call it their ‘second brain’.
Todoist—Nailing ‘the one’ thing
Todoist is another task management app like Notion. It is, in fact, the best to-do list app out there. While Notion simplifies ‘everything’ in your life, Todoist does one thing brilliantly. It provides the best experience to users for adding and managing tasks.
With the promise of ‘organizing all tasks’, what it really offers users is cognitive ease. Getting all those tasks out of your head and onto your to-do list frees up mental energy.
It’s essential for good design to reduce friction especially while user performs the ‘main’ job. As the main job in Todoist is to add a new task, they make it a breeze. You can enter a task in seconds by typing the letter Q on desktop or pressing ‘+’ button on the iPhone app. You can also use natural language input, which makes the experience of adding tasks quick and detailed at the same time. It intelligently recognizes the details in the task as you type in, like due dates, tags, assignees, priority, etc.
The app also provides integration with voice assistance. Instead of typing in, you can tell Siri or Amazon Echo to add a task to your list.
The high expectation customers of Todoist are productivity seekers who geek out on organizing and analyzing their lives. This app is packed with capabilities that help them do so but it never feels overwhelming. The UI feels light and intuitive. As with the other products in our list, you discover more as you need more and use it more.
Forest—Design powered by a noble cause
If you are hooked to playlists like ‘Deep Focus’ and ‘Flow State’ on Spotify, you know that being ‘in flow’ or ‘in the zone’ is a real thing. It’s the time you achieve maximum focus and productivity. Productivity gurus swear by it. Even Disney acknowledges it in a movie 😉.
But how do we attain this state surrounded by digital distractions shouting for our attention all the time? Our phone keeps us busy with a constant influx of social media updates, emails, discounts, and limited offers!
Welcome Forest.
It’s the top ranked productivity app in 136 countries with a clear value proposition — ‘Stay focussed, stay present’. It helps users focus on the task at hand and keeps digital distractions at bay.
It does so using a beautifully designed timer based on Pomodoro technique. But what makes this app unique is its noble cause of planting trees 🌲!
This is how it works — When you need to focus on a task, open the Forest app, select a virtual tree to grow, and start the timer (10 mins up to 120 mins). Get on with your task on your desktop and leave your phone alone.
If you can’t help looking at your phone screen, you’ll see smartly crafted messages like ‘Don’t look at me’, ‘Leave me alone!’, ‘Go back to your work’. All meant to help you stay focussed.
Your virtual tree grows if you stick to the session . Over time, you can build an entire forest. If you get distracted and use your phone for checking out your whatsapp or responding to an email, your tree dies.
I know it’s a virtual tree but I still don’t want to be a tree killer. There must be many more who share the same sentiments as the app has 6 million paying customers!
Users earn credits from each focus session. They can use those to plant real trees. Forest works with Tree for the future, a non-profit organization that helps farmers of South Africa by growing thousands of trees.
Help yourself, help poor farmers, and help Earth! That’s an incentive to keep coming back. You are likely to invite friends and family to ‘plant together’. It’s a feature of the app designed for people to work together as a group. If one member of the group fails, all trees wither. This app is a perfect example of how design can help a product grow organically.
The idea to ‘plant trees to stay focussed’ is intriguing to start with and delightful to stay with. Growing of the virtual tree provides the immediate delight but helping towards the bigger cause is a source of sustained delight for each user. It instills a sense of pride and brand loyalty.
Best of designs are the ones that help users achieve clarity.
Around brings clarity to work amongst team members. Elevate brings us clarity of thought through better listening, thinking, and writing. Notion brings clarity to our entire personal and professional workspace. Todoist clears up our mind of things that don’t need our constant bandwidth. Forest brings clarity to what matters most at the moment.
At the end of the day, UX is nothing but clarity.
In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.
— Yuval Noah Harari
