Project scope:

  Over the course of my first week at General Assembly, I took part in my first 4 day design sprint. We were tasked with the challenge of solving a fellow classmates daily problem with the help of a mobile application,  in order to show our understanding of user research and interface by putting our skills to the test creating a low- fidelity prototype. 

 

Utensils:

Paper, pencil , sticky notes, sharpie, brainpower

 

The Duration:

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The problem: 

 

   My Partner finds herself constantly battling between her ideal schedule  and the reality of her day to day. How might we help the user strike a better work life balance in areas they feel they’re currently underperforming? 

 

 

The solution

 Using a mobile application to create a simple visual representation of the users tasks by category and importance. That will allow them to better be able to see areas they could spend more time. 

 

 

 

 

User Research: 

    Through interviewing my partner, I was able to gain some insight into her busy life, She is driven by hard work and her passion for health and nutrition. As well as  understanding the level of importance a good schedule and weekly planning has in my partners life. Coming from a background in data and sales, I was able to find out that graphs and charts have been a helpful tool to her visual understanding. I was also able to sort through her current toolbox and better understand what features she likes and dislikes with her current time management tools. 

 

 

 

Competitive analysis: 

 

  After asking “how do you use technology already to help you with your time management?” my partner informed me that she was an avid user of Google Calendar on both her laptop and phone. I then asked her what functions google calendar had that were beneficial, she came up with a fairly decent list of pros but also contradicted a lot of them with ways that they could potentially be better. My user also sets important reminders in the Apple IOS calendar app to have an extra platform to 

 

 

User Feedback:

     After creating an affinity map  I got to work on my ideas and took some of them back to follow up with my partner.  I was able to see the areas in which I was going in the wrong direction as well as get affirmation of positives in my current ideas. One of the main things that i got feedback on was that  I started off with the idea to take a more motivatiational approach, because of the insight my user gave that she was heavily word motivated, but only found them useful if they were in the right context.  With that information I took a step back from that idea and focused on the things she was pleased with, the simple visuals of easy to read charts. I believe this stemmed from her background in data, and sales has got her comfortable to the idea of reading charts

 

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Starting to Sketch:

After learning the importance a storyboard can have to help gain empathy,  i decided to start there! Showing a scenario where my current user gets overwhelmed with an abundance of activities on her schedule, and walking through the journey of her finding “WellSpent”  time management app i have created, she then logs all activity she has done daily for a week, and looks at her weekly report to find out that she has spent almost all her time studying that week, and is shocked she has spent almost no time working out and going to yoga.  

 

 

 

The Design:

Using all the knowledge I gained from my user i got to work on creating a low fidelity prototype, i did that by creating a logo first to better customize the feel of my app and create a loading screen that appears when you launch the app, it looked like this. 

 

 

Image 4: After clicking on the weekly report CTO on the previous screen you are then brought a new screen with the current dates accounted for and the breakdown of the categories,  chosen by the user based on their personal weekly activities. This allows the user too quickly and visually see where it is the majority of your time is being spent. 

Image 5: After clicking the report CTA button you are brought to a new screen, that includes a summary of what it is you did that week as well as ideas to better fill the  gaps where users feel they are underperforming. In this scenario the user is informed that she might benefit from finding time to spend outside more next week. 

Image 6: In this design flow you follow the “remember me” feature that takes you to a new screen, where you pick when ( date, and time) the user would like to be reminded to do so, as well as a drop down to create a note of what exactly they would like to be reminded of. By clicking the “add” symbol at the bottom of the screen your reminder will be added to the list and will let you know when the time is right!

 

The Outcome:

After presenting the idea to my fellow colleagues and instructor I followed up with my partner to see what she thought about my idea. She told me she loved the idea of being able to track where it is the majority of her time was going, although she knows where the majority of her time is going to be spent over the next 10 weeks. 

 

My first “next” step would be to do a usability test with a larger group of people to better understand if my idea is valuable. Another important next step would be to do more research on existing time management apps in order to better back my ideas with real-time data, and as a way to put a more creative touch on what i know i could create.