Timid!
Application Design & UX Research.
OBJECTIVE
To develop an app to help contribute to a user’s productivity. To research and understand gaps and needs in the market, in order to raise a unique value proposition for our product.
TEAM SIZE & ROLE
Solo: Research, Design, Prototyping
TIMEFRAME
10 weeks
Stay in the know!
Timid is a productivity app helping users keep track of their events, notes, and reminders. The app uses calendars, documents, and sticky notes to help users boost their productivity in a way that suits their specific needs.
Why?
Students can often feel overwhelmed with the number of events, meetings, and projects they have to get done. Because most calendar apps today only allow users to keep track of deadlines, this can limit their ability to stay fully productive.
A Competitive Analysis!
Before starting the project, I researched the market for different productivity-based apps. By doing a competitor analysis, I could build off of existing strengths within these apps. From here, I would be able to gather my findings and develop a problem statement, ultimately defining my goals for the project. I then hypothesized core functionalities within the app I would design—from calendar functions, event creation, note-taking features, and more. These would be a focal point of inquiry within my research.
I then interviewed 5 different students about their means of staying productive—whether it be using calendar apps, physical planners, or reminder apps. The research was focused on understanding why users were drawn to specific apps or planners, leveraging why users avoided certain functionalities and apps over others. After these interviews, I found several themes that I would center my app’s design. These were:
Clarity. Users felt certain apps held visual clutter in their design that inhibited their ability to keep track of their events and assignments—a problem, particularly found on screens with dense content, such as list views.
Customizability. All users interviewed expressed a high desire for customization and user freedom within calendar and note-taking apps—particularly towards systems like tags, calendars, and more.
Speedy Wireframes!
Upon drafting out my solutions, I came up with the following screens below. The app would have calendar and planner functionalities, letting people block out their schedules and keep track of events and assignments. Along with this, I’d include note-taking features, a Pomodoro timer, and a home screen for users to curate widgets and shortcuts to different functionalities found across the app.
I found myself further exploring the idea of a dashboard—a space letting users customize its layout and content through various widgets, tools, and shortcuts. Here, you could choose from a selection of widgets—some as Pomodoro timers, others displaying daily weather forecasts, and some as user-made shortcuts to note and event creation.
But then, I realized something…
Was this really meeting the need for customizability that users needed? Just because the dashboard I was designing was based ENTIRELY on the basis of user customization—why develop widgets for shortcuts when users are already interacting inside the app? Would our users primarily interacting with calendar and note-taking functions bother? Was this even USEFUL?
Users who held “customizability” as a key need in their user experience, weren’t looking for the ability to build their user flows and dashboard from scratch. They were looking to have freedom in the way they interacted with the app! This, coupled with the fact that the dashboard would require extensive amounts of time planning out widget functionalities, layouts, and screens—I decided to scrap the concept entirely. As a solo project with a looming deadline—it just wasn’t reasonable to commit to a half-baked idea under such constraints.
So… I started brainstorming some more!
Upon interviewing users who preferred physical planners, I learned that all of them enjoyed using blank spaces inside to jot down random notes, reminders, and doodles. This was a big insight—the idea of accomodating a space for people to throw out random short-term notes that they can refer to. To emulate this, I settled on the idea of a sticky note page, a place to jot down small notes, doodles, and more. By having a third option for users to curate more short-term, random notes, we can accommodate for customizability in a way that lets users determine which touchpoints should be used for specific needs.
Prototypes: Key Design Decisions!
Having moved into the final stage of my design process—I decided to keep three important things in mind when designing for my app. These focuses were heavily influenced by user research conducted, hoping to accommodate for needs expressed during the interview process.
Fluidity via bidirectionality
For seamless navigation, I wanted to provide multiple touchpoints for users to traverse the app. Whether it be through the bottom app bar, hamburger menu, or calendar menu, users can develop habits that work best for them.
To further this, I designed calendars, notes, and tags to be accessible through the hamburger menu, allowing for quick and easy access across the app’s interface.
Emphasizing Clarity
Through user research, many users exclaimed that list views currently found on calendar apps felt overwhelming to navigate, with no clear end or rest to their list of assignments and events.
To help reduce cognitive overload, I decided accordions would be minimized at default, only displaying tasks for the day upon opening. This helps users parse through their tasks and events at their own pace, in a way that’s much more readable.
Short-term, scrappable notes
An important finding came from users who used physical planners, for the ability to jot down notes unrelated to their schedule and events. Whether it be random reminders, doodles, or thoughts, this was an important level of personalization that most calendar and productivity apps don’t exactly accommodate for.
Here, we can let users have the freedom of writing down anything that might be on their minds. I tried to further its identity as a space for short-term, scrappable notes by providing several touchpoints for note deletion.