Morning habits App in February: On the way to improve mornings everywhere

This is the second monthly post on my journey with the One Side Project challenge — developing an iOS App that guides you through your mornings, calmly. You can find part one here.

Well folks, the month is over — Happy March everyone! I am proud to provide you with my monthly report on the progress of my App, MorningRoutine.

Some people reached out to me after I described my project idea in my first post — an iOS-App that helps you stick with a morning routine and keeps your morning calm by gently reminding you what you need to be doing, while you’re doing it. I’m super-glad that the idea and my concept doesn’t sound completely out-of-place and that some people are even looking forward to me releasing the app — which, everything working my way, will be in late autumn this year!

If you have an amazing idea or would just like to chat, as always feel free to drop me a line.

Looking back on February

There has been a lot happening both in my private life as well as in the development of the App, though I have to concede that some of the goals I set in my previous update may have been a little ambitious — especially with finals week (remember, I’m still in med school) dropping in and gallantly reminding me that even the sweetest Side Project has to make way for my day-to-day sometimes. One of the biggest take-aways this month for me was that good things sometimes take time, especially if you’re still learning — and that’s okay. After all, what would there be to write about if my entire project would be over in a month?

“Forty seconds? But I want it now!”
-Homer J. Simpson

Nevertheless, I am proud to report some moderate progress to you:

• Managed to work on the App’s Design and create concepts for all main interactions with the App — looking forward to showing them around and validating them this month
• Further developed the idea of a text-to-speech-feature as a guide through mornings and decided to put it temporarily on hold. As someone told me, it’s generally not a great idea to half-ass five things, instead of thoroughly focusing on one
• Found some useful resources for freely available sounds and am selecting simple, non-disruptive notification sounds that go with the overall flow and experience of the App.

Project website

That is one task I have to report an honest delay on right now — life got in the way and the design work and working on the basic app structure (data model, view transitions, menu UI etc.) already gave me plenty to focus on during the shortest month of the year.

The topic has been on my mind a lot though and I’ll be setting up a landing page and registering a domain name first thing in March — allowing everyone to be notified of either the upcoming beta-version or the final release in late fall.

March Goals

• Create a first project website — if that goal sounds familiar, that’s because it is — didn’t manage to finish that one in February, so to the top of the list it goes
• Have a running prototype on my test device to guide me through my mornings and allow me to stream-line any UX obstacles I encounter: obviously nothing super-fancy, but I should be along far enough to use the App on my test device by the end of the month during my own scrambled mornings
• Find potential users and focus-group-members willing to test an eventual beta-version of the app and discuss feature ideas with — every one of you following my journey on Medium is of course cordially invited
  If you’re interested, just reach out to me on Twitter or at J.bjoerklund@gmail.com

Thanks for reading!
Feel free to give this article a recommend 💚 if you like it.
I’m taking One Side Project Challenge and I will post project update on the 1st of every month. Follow the publication and / or me to see how my project idea develops. Let’s make mornings great!