Organyze — Tejus Krishnan

My experience designing a mobile app for users to create, manage and share their daily routines.

Overview

Project deliverables

User interface

My role

User interviews
Personas
Wireframing
High-fidelity prototyping
Visual design

Project context

Project for HCDE 318 - Intro to User-Centered Design, University of Washington
Timeframe: 10 weeks
Team: Tejus Krishnan, Anahita Gharai, Rajbir Singh
Tools used: Figma, Marvel

Background

Throughout the day, nearly everyone is faced with the challenge of managing multiple responsibilities across a variety of contexts, including their job, education, and personal/social life. Whether one is working to maintain their daily routine or change it to accommodate a different lifestyle, habit formation remains the backbone of a person’s daily life.

Research has shown that habits are most effectively maintained when performed repeatedly in the same context, and reinforced using a consistent system of cues and rewards. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of individuals’ lives have been constrained to a single context: their home environment. This has made it doubly challenging to maintain a consistently healthy and productive lifestyle. Our team set out to create a robust, intuitive way for individuals to plan out their day and hold themselves accountable to completing the tasks required of them.

User Research

Interviews

We interviewed three individuals of different ages and occupations, all of whom led busy lives with multiple daily responsibilities to meet. We wanted our product to answer to a range of productivity levels, from high-performing individuals to those struggling to fulfill their daily tasks. We emerged with the following findings:

Personas

After our three interviews, we created two personas representing a composite of the interview responses we received. We provided the two personas with contrasting characteristics to reflect the variation of our responses - particularly when it came to individuals’ productivity levels and attitudes regarding technology.

Design Process

Design requirements

Based on our interviews, personas, and user journey maps, we came up with a list of design requirements and goals for our solution.

Ideation + Brainstorming

Based on our design requirements, we spent multiple team meetings ideating solutions and categorizing them by our user needs. We initially decided on a three-pronged approach that would combine software and hardware to enable individuals to create and manage their daily routines. It consisted of:

A mobile app
The use of smart home systems (such as Amazon Alexa)
Specialized wall projectors to display the contents of one’s routine around different parts of their household

The broader goal was to allow users to populate their homes with cues to reinforce their desired habits.

sCOPING

As we approached the prototyping stage of the design, we realized that our combined digital/physical solution would be too broad for the scope of our project, and that we didn’t have a feasible way to represent the hardware component of our solution as a deliverable.

Additionally, we reasoned that the product’s use of smart home systems would violate the needs and privacy concerns of individuals who preferred not to over-rely on technology, as well as bias our product towards those affluent enough to afford a full-fledged smart home system in their households.

Therefore, we narrowed the scope of our project to a mobile app alone, which we felt was:

More feasible to implement within our timeframe
More intuitive and easily accessible to users
More respectful of our users’ needs and concerns

Product fEATURES

Now that we were solely focusing on a mobile app experience, we had the time and freedom to dive deeper into creating features that would make the product stand out from conventional calendar/task-management apps.

Our most important addition was a social component to the app: allowing users to share the routines they create, either with their friends or with the public on a kind of “marketplace.” Given the popular demand for the morning routines of high-performing individuals, we felt that turning routines into a shareable entity on an app - like an Instagram post - would turn the often abstract world of self-help/productivity advice into a thriving, easily accessible ecosystem.

Through a second round of ideation, we divided our app into three primary workflows:

Routines - The primary function of the app. Includes creating, editing, and sharing tasks.
Social - For viewing and messaging your friends on the app, as well as viewing their routines
Featured - A public space for all users on the app to share and curate their routines.

Information Architecture

Prototyping

Wireframes + low-fidelity Prototype

Using our information architecture as a guideline, we created a series of wireframes which we converted into a low-fidelity prototype based on the annotations we provided to each screen.

Below is the original slide deck we prepared for our low-fidelity prototype, with annotations explaining the specific interactions and goals for each stage of the user journey.

Evaluation

In our user feedback, we tested our low-fidelity prototype on high school students. This evaluation session gave us the opportunity to observe pain points and workflow inconsistencies, as well as receive direct user feedback on our design.

Based on the feedback we received in our evaluation, we made the following changes to the app:

Switching the ‘Social’ and ‘Featured’ tabs to draw more attention to the apps social networking features
Auto-generating messages to hold friends accountable, such as “Don’t forget to meditate tomorrow when you wake up” given that the user can see their friends’ routine
Showing users when their friends are online to make messaging more efficient

High-Fidelity prototype + Visual Design

By incorporating our user feedback into our app’s user journey, we were ready to create a high-fidelity prototype, bearing fully-realized interaction mechanisms and a clear visual language. In defining the app’s visual identity, I sought to convey space and simplicity - qualities we are aiming to introduce into our users’ lives through our product.

I gave the app a light theme with a cool color palette full of blue, mint-green and cyan hues to evoke the visual and emotional language of meditation apps. I also continued my tradition of emphasizing rounded shapes both in the UI components and typeface, since I find it a simple yet effective way of making any app feel more inviting and lively.