Task Fox-a UX Case Study
For as long as I can remember, every year when New Years rolls around, I make the same resolution — to make a resolution the following year. That is kind of a goal, right? However, this year was different. I actually stuck to my previous year’s resolution and made a list of goals ranging from purging our house each season to writing a book. However, I often lose track of my goals because I write them in my Notes app, or in a planner which eventually gets bogged down by the endless amounts of notes or days flying by. I know I’m not the only one who struggles to make goals, let alone the only person to be behind on them, so with that in mind, my team and I decided to make Task Fox.
Task Fox is an app designed to solve that issue, to encourage you to complete tasks by reminders, progress, and competition so you can be more productive and become a goal crushing badass. 👊
Design Process
On this project, we worked with two iOS developers, which has been eye opening in regards to development limitations. We also had less than a month to design and develop our app before submitting it to the App Store, so our design process was put on light speed mode. However, we stuck to the essentials:
01) Research
02) Ideate
03) Design
04) Prototype
Lets get down to business
Research
Every person has a different method in how they like to complete their goals so we first created a survey to figure out those methods, which yielded 115 results. We realized that only 8.7% of participants use an app for task management, which meant that we needed to create a killer app that people would actually want to use, but how?
First, we looked at the results from our survey. We were able to get some insight into how others create tasks and accomplish their goals. We then held interviews with individuals about their process in regards to task management and interviewed a total of six people. Some key quotations that we gained from our interviews are the following:
What are some things that prevent you from creating and completing a task? -“Being overwhelmed by the task itself, currently it’s because of time and being able to break it down and being okay with not getting it done all at once.”
How do you ensure that you complete your tasks? “Remembering the tasks. Keeping the tasks at the forefront of my mind to prevent distractions.”
Do you create tasks for work, personal, or both? “Both. For work I often use it for daily goals, things that I make sure to get done that day. I share them with my coworkers. Personal use, I usually write down habits that I want to instill indefinitely.”
The information garnered from both our survey and interviews helped us in creating our persona in narrowing down our user’s goals. Having the persona was like having a snapshot of our research, and our user’s goals at hand every step of the way which helped us to not get sidetracked.
Ideate
After creating our persona, we were guided into our process of ideation. We had four clear goals that laid down a solid path of what needed to be accomplished in order to assist the user in task management. Because of our research, we knew we needed to show the user’s progress and a system for our user to stay accountable.
User Story Map
We first started jotting down ideas and creating a user story map. Our user story map was a helpful way of organizing all of our ideas in one place. It also gave us the opportunity to collaborate ideas with our iOS developers so we could be on the same page. We realized some of the things we had originally wanted could not be built within our time frame, so we turned back towards our research and persona, and went back to the drawing board.
Based off our research we learned that people create tasks to complete both professional and personal goals which worked in our benefit. The American Society of Training and Development did a study on accountability and found that your chances of completing a goal are increased by 65% if you commit to someone. Now, if you set a due date with a person you’ve committed, you will increase your chance of success by up to 95%! Due to this, we decided to put systems in place to not only track and record your progress, but to hold yourself and others accountable by nothing other than some good old healthy competition!
We created this competition through something we called challenges. This enabled users to compete against coworkers and friends, and whoever completed the most tasks would win.
The Challenge
We originally had goals, tasks, and challenges broken up into separate pages which you can see in our initial designs below. However, we had to ask ourselves, if a person wanted to create a challenge with themselves, would that make it a goal? If a challenge was created by one person, then there would be no one to compete against. Is competiting against yourself enough of a motivator for those trying to complete a goal? These were the types of questions we had to ask ourselves. We realized that we wanted to enable our users, not disable them.
MVP
After these conversations with our project managers and within our team we decided to combine them all under goals which not only simplified the process, but the design. With this, users have the option to turn challenges on and off and view all their tasks within a particular goal. Win-win!
At this point, we created an MVP and collaborated on it with our developers. We wanted to make sure that everyone was on the same page, and the things we had ideated were feasible for everyone involved within our short time frame.
User Flow
We then put pen to paper and created a user flow to ensure all loose ends were tied up nice and tight! After creating our flow, we created a prototype with Invision to make sure everything made sense to our users and flowed nicely. After receiving feedback that we were on the right track from those we tested our designs with, we moved forward with our hi-fidelity designs.
Design
When it came to the design, we knew it had to be fun, encouraging and professional. We chose the color orange as our main color because it is associated with encouragement, determination, stimulation, happiness, and enthusiasm which are all things we wanted to emulate through TaskFox. We also used blue as a secondary color as it is calming. Since our color story is quite bright, we also wanted to contrast that with the simplistic style of material design. We thought this design would encourage users to complete their tasks and goals, but not be overwhelmed by them.
The End Game
Spoiler* If the Avengers had TaskFox, they would have been able to bring everyone back A LOT sooner. Teamwork makes the dreams work, but so does task management! Overall based off our usability testing, we received positive and useful feedback. Being able to work in an agile environment however has helped me as a designer know what's feasible, and what's not, within our short deadline.
If only…
we had more time, I would have really liked to have spent more time with our developers and ensuring that our style is consistent throughout our end product. I would have liked to have tested more and made minor changes so certain aspects would be more intuitive to our users. I also would have wanted to build out the competition and collaborative aspect of group goals more. Overall, TaskFox is a helpful tool in task management and soon everyone will be looking at you and thinking #lifegoals
Check out our prototype here:
Please feel free to download TaskFox from the App Store.
Let’s talk if you have any questions or suggestions!
