Stick with Our Goals with GoalKeeper— App Design Showcase
This article is a showcase of the design progress of my interaction and interface design project — GoalKeeper, which is made to be a trustworthy and encouraging digital pal to individuals who want to start really achieve goals, no matter big or small.
This is an individual project, I’ve covered the process of user research (including need-finding and product research), ideation (including storyboarding and brainstorming), prototyping and evaluation (paper & digital prototyping with heuristic evaluation and usability test).
The final prototype is made to pixels, whose visual style is greatly inspired by the wonderful visuals of NoteCircle App and open-sourced illustration set Open Doodles.
The challenge: the gap between want it and did it
Whether it’s completing a project or assignment, getting rid of bad habits, maintaining good relationships, everyone has some goals to achieve. But wanting to achieve and actually doing it — and sticking with it — are two very different things.
In the digital era, we have plenty of tools (often categorized as To-do lists, reminders, or calendar apps). But still, easy tasks and errands are easily crossed, leaving the obscure ones intact and forgotten. Such people often refer to themselves as “procrastinators”.
But it doesn’t matter how we call ourselves. In the award-winning psychologist Dr. Sean Young’s book Stick with It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life-for Good, a crucial way to change people’s behavior is to change the process.
I spent 2 months working on this project to seek positive yet practical digital experiences to help people harness emotional meaning to motivate changes. I have applied a user-centered design process to verify the hypothesis derived from the need-finding phase, followed by extensive competitor research and brainstorm to generate ideas and then generated and verified the ideas with iterations of feedbacks.
Project timeline
The project lasted for two months since the kick-off. I wasn’t able to stick with it as expected due to work and other life-arrangements. Yet the general progress is okay as I was able to catch up thanks to the year-end holidays (and COVID-19).
Research to find problems and gather insights
I’ve spent the first four weeks in need-finding and ideation at the beginning of this project.
Limited by the quarantine policy, I was not able to conduct in-field observations thereafter zoom conferences were conducted among participants from various backgrounds. My interviews centered around if participants are satisfied with their current achievements in work and life, and how they keep up with them. I was in particular interested in understanding what tools my participants are using now or have used before, and their perceptions of these tools.
I then did product research covering follow scopes:
- Productivity tools
- Targeted to mobile users from 16 to 50
- Includes core functionalities related to task management and scheduling, habit-forming, behavioral change, time & event logging
→ Find more about the consolidated observations
→ Find more about the list of product researches
Research findings
I’ve consolidated the data collected and synthesized them into insights:
Ideation
The ideation phase involves storyboarding, brainstorming ideas and then determine which ones would be effective in solving the problems and desirable to potential users.
I did brainstorming with Jean Liu, a friend who graduated from HCI specification and front-end developer. We brainstormed 30 ideas together then narrowed them down to 10 possible ideas to explore.
→ Find more about our brainstormed ideas
We’ve also curated a set of keywords, which served as a compass of the upcoming design activity:
Prototype iterations and verification
Target user
Even though no personas were made as the App is designed for a wide spectrum of users, I still value these key attributes to the target users:
- Smartphone users
- Aged between 16 to 50
- Any level of tech-savviness
- Wants to start achieving goals that matter to their life
Prototyping
I went through 2 rounds of paper prototyping followed by 3 rounds of medium-fidelity prototyping before finalizing the design with visuals.
→ View paper prototype (first iteration)
Heuristic Evaluations and Tests
At the end of (almost) each phase of prototyping, heuristic evaluations or user tests were taken. In total, 8 volunteers from various cultural backgrounds and age groups participated the evaluations and tests. They have shared remarkable thoughts and brought extra insights into the product.
The last rounds of user tests happened at the last stage of the medium-fidelity prototype. Tests were made with two sets of clickable prototypes (similar prototype with two variations to verify), and were completed by 4 English-speaking participants recruited on UserTesting.com. I am more concerned with testing usability and flow between screens.
Adjustments on different levels happened during the iterations, including changes of project scope, amendments to defective function hint, enhancement on interactions, etc.
The final prototype
My final solution is a mobile application that allows users to set up and track their personal goals. Represented in a minimalist notebook look, it allows users to have full and control over the big picture as well as small steps to start achieving.
Creating tasks were made easy
Similar to writing on a notebook, creating tasks is made to be easy to let ideas flowing freely. Subtasks, dates, progress are all skippable during the early planning stage.
The interface is minimized to the most extensive to encourage focus.
Scheduling tasks by batch whenever the user is ready to
It’s totally fine to keep the tasks “unscheduled” until the user is ready to work on them.
Switch and check all tasks on any day
The day tab encapsulates a calendar and cross-goal task list, enabling users to check all tasks that scheduled on any day.
Progress, always under control
GoalKeeper knows some tasks will last longer.
As an optional step, the user can maneuver the progress of a task as wished for particular progress tracking of bulky tasks.
Small achievements were well kept
The progress of a goal can be measured in days and tasks to provide a bigger picture to users.
The logbook is accessible from the app as well as each goal and will be kept even after the user has completed a goal.
Mark things important to you as you worth it
The specially designed closing ritual encourages the user to keep evolving with their goals, whether it’s successfully achieved, or given up for good.
→ Experience the Product in Live (Figma Prototype)
What’s Next?
Due to the limitation of time and resources, I dropped the idea of socialization as motivation (refer to Insight 4) when starting the medium-fidelity prototypes. However, the idea was warmly welcomed by the participants who joined the early evaluations.
GoalKeeper has so far achieved the fundamental functionalities as a task management tool, and I am looking forward to moving on with including the wild social features, this excites me a lot.
In the meanwhile, although this is an interaction design project I am open to any possibilities of collaborations that could possibly make it a real app. Developers, feel free to approach me via Gmail or LinkedIn.
Credits
- Kyoungok Park’s NoteCircle App—The main navigation and color palette has inspired me a lot during the interface design.
- Pablo Stanley’s Open Doodles Illustration Set — The static illustrations are from this open-source sketch set
Special Thanks
- Kirais, Cindy, Jennie, Priscilla — who shared their tricks and struggles in their work and life
- Jean — who contributed to the group brainstorming phase and contributed her brilliant ideas to the bucket list
- Vic, Joanne, Forrest — who contributed their valuable feedback and brilliant ideas to the paper prototypes
- The four test participants from UserTesting.com— who shared their honest responses, complements and critiques with the online prototype
