The Problem Space
As the number of platforms we use as students and professionals continues to grow, so does the complexity of getting and staying organized.
Many of us struggle with forgetting important deadlines or bringing everything we need to an appointment. Many of us also have multiple systems for staying on track, but none of them "talk" to each other very well.
Our mission was to help alleviate some of the cognitive load of staying organized.
The Team
Kefeng Wang
About
This project was completed for HCDE 518, a graduate-level course on User-Centered Design, at the University of Washington. Our team conceptualized and prototyped a design solution for our problem space in under 10 weeks.
Design Question
How can we help students & professionals become more organized when important information is spread across a large number of digital tools?
User Research
To help solve our design question, we asked ourselves - what would be the best way to find out when, where, and how people struggle with staying organized? Who has problems staying organized? What are their feelings on using multiple devices to stay organized?
For our investigation, we included both college students and working professionals.
Interviews allowed us to ask important follow-up questions
Diary studies showed us more long-term behavior and organizational activities
Our survey showed us trends across a wider swath of a population
Research Synthesis + Findings
Through our research methods, we discovered some key findings that would help us understand the scope of the organization problem as well as some potential directions for a design solution.
Personas
From our research, we developed three personas to guide our product development. As we noted above, Students and Professionals have slightly different needs. This resulted in two personas that we would go on to design for. Lastly, we outlined an anti-persona to reflect who we were not designing for.
Primary Persona:
We were designing primarily for students who had to juggle a class schedule, deadlines, differing priorities, extracurriculars, on top of their personal lives
Secondary Persona:
We spoke with professionals who needed the capability to integrate with IoT devices, repeated reminders, and one place for all reminders
Anti-Persona:
We are not designing for folks who don' require an advanced organization solution or simply aren't busy enough to require a one-stop-shop for events and to-dos.
Sketching
We brainstormed potential solutions by sketching and mood boarding on paper and FigJam. The 3 sketches below were the potential solutions that were proposed to fulfill the needs of the users we surveyed. The first is an priority app, followed by an IoT solution, and the last is an integration of both.
One of the ideas we had was for prioritization of to-dos...
Another idea we had was strictly an IoT solution where the user is acting independent of a screen...
Then we thought: "what if we integrated all of the ideas we have so far?"
Storyboards
We created user stories that lined up with our target personas: students and professionals. We thought through how each of these people would ideally re-structure their organization throughout the day and in different situations. Going through this exercise helped us begin to identify the key needs and wants from our target users and begin to identify some features necessary to make the app functional.
Users are able to set daily reminders through our smart assistant connecting app
Users are able to create an upcoming event with the event title, time or deadline, location, priority (high, mid, and low), and items they need to prepare as well as take for this event.
Users can set reminders for priority of special events and items to bring along.
Design goals
After we proposed a solution and features of our product, we derived some design principles that we would use to guide our work moving forward. Among other things, our solution should work seamlessly with other integrations such as Google Calendar, it should feel motivated (not demotivated) to get things done, it should be helpful to get tasks done, and it should feel "smart".
Easy UI to communicate.
It should inspire users to organize life.
Helpful
It should help get tasks done.
Smart
It should anticipate a user’s routines and reduce cognitive load
User flow
We have presented three key features in this user flow:
Adding events. Users are required to enter the following information about the event: title, time, location, priority level, and forgettable items.
Editing existing events.
Updating progress for particular events.
Priority level and forgettable items are the primary functions that differentiate our design solution to products already published on the market. This is the reason why we create this user flow based on these two elements.
Initial Prototype
Similar display compared to most calendar Apps on the market. Users can view items they need to prepare for that event on the main page without any further operations. Using colors to present different priority levels.
Users need to have basic info, like title, time. Users can also add items mutually as well as accept recommendations. Users can choose to turn on progress tracking function to keep their life more organized.
Users can update their progress for particular events in the editing page by dragging the % button.
Prototyping Feedback and Iterations
One common confusion during the prototype sessions was about the event colors. Our users did not understand the color choices. To be more intuitive, following the color schemes of a stop-light, we chose to differentiate the priority levels using the green-yellow-red scheme.
Another common pain-point from our prototype was that users said purely quantifying their progress was difficult. Thus, we updated the progress bar into intervals of 10's, which is also easily updatable straight from the event's page.
Finally, some users did not find the icons on our prototype intuitive. Thus, similar to how Notion allows users to pick their own icons, we designed our items page such that users can define the visualizations of their items.
Final Prototype
Users can add items needed for events. These items will be displayed across the app.
Users can track the progress of certain tasks. They can easily update the progress by dragging the slider back and forth at 10% intervals.
When the user inputs the event name, using language processing and machine learning algorithms, Secutary can recommend items that the user may need for the different events.
Users have access to a virtual "secretary", both through speaker and message forms, that reminds people what to bring in a human-like and friendly way.
Users can select certain notification methods for events with different priorities. Secutary can send notifications through authorized smart devices, such as Google Home or Alexa.
Product Demo