Click Planner, Paper Meets App
Last summer I began a one-year Interaction Design Specialization out of UC San Diego through Coursera. I wanted to learn more about “Human Centered Interaction Design.” Unlike some of my peers, I did not have an established concept for what to build as my capstone. My starting point challenged me on a deep level, so I began with some focused questions and listening. My first interviews directed the end product.
The interviews surprised me. My design brief was personal change — what people do, what works, how and what they are doing to facilitate change. My big discovery was…paper. Each of my users had handwritten notes and lists as part of their process. In what way can paper be part of an app? They needed a way to manage the changes they were making with speed and ease, by writing things down in a notepad, on a scrap, in a planner. My users had different motivations; tracking, remembering, reminding. These notes were often not at hand when needed, and as a result sometimes useless, except for the initial value of getting thoughts out in the world.
Point of view for my app Click Planner™: Making personal change is inherently complex. Managing habits and behaviors takes organized effort. The tools that manage complexity need to be simple and obvious.
One of my interviewees said she needed “project management for life”. This is what I set out to design. Simplicity when coupled with flexibility is a great challenge in design.
First, how could paper be made digital, searchable, and integrated with other applications, such as calendars? I wanted it to be as easy as taking a picture. Adding notes had to be mindless. As I thought through the various ways in which people would interact with their documents, features and complexity began to creep in. I endeavored to make it possible to integrate paper without adding layers of complexity, limiting the app to doing a few things well.
The part of the design process that was most instructive was building prototypes….from paper! It allowed me to quickly get ideas out, test, and modify features. It let me break my design before spending time developing something that may not work.
Once the “what and how” of the app has been tested (and broken and fixed a few times), I put the whole thing together in its interactive form for more user testing. I used Sketch and InVision to build the app and the interactive prototype. After testing with four users, I had a clear idea of what was and wasn’t working in the design. I then A/B tested my navigation, which lead to a difference of a full five minutes to complete a task. I saw firsthand what happens when the bank of goodwill runs out of cash. This lead to another round of design iteration — and another challenge, when do you stop iterating a design? Answer: When your time is up and not sooner.
Time is up! My finished prototype can be seen here: https://invis.io/5N878CA32
