A SIMPLER WAY TO ORGANIZE BUSY SCHEDULES
To-do App Design Concept
MOBILE APP DESIGN · USER TESTING · RESEARCH
Overview
Everyone has trouble holding themselves accountable to meeting their goals for the day, week, or even month. Let’s face it—it’s not an easy feat! With all the features you could ever need, To-Do You is a to-do list application for desktop and mobile that aims to be something the user wants to come back to.
TEAM
Solo UX/UI Designer
MY ROLE
Responsible for conceptualization and research, design, prototyping
TIMELINE
June – Sept. 2021 | 10 Weeks
TOOLS
Adobe Xd, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop
Video Overview
Problem Space
Mental health often weighs heavily on stress. Being a college student can put young adults in an environment full of new stressors. Among other things, the most obvious is academic achievement. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), as many as 87% of college students cite education as their primary source of stress. To make matters worse, the National Library of Medicine states that “academic stress has been shown to negatively impact mental health in students” to the point where the APA has found that over 60% of college students met the criteria for at least one mental health problem. An (admittedly less reliable) source also cites a Statista survey that found that 86% of US college students report difficulty with time management.
Clearly, a lack of proper planning and time management is causing some serious issues for college students.
However, with Generation Z’s 8 second attention span (refer to my Washington Post Case Study) comes the challenge of designing an app that can help out college students manage their time better while not being overly complicated and still being interesting.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
How can we design an app that captures and retains the attention of college students while being simple enough to use that students don’t have to spend excessive amounts of time creating tasks or reminders?
First Steps
Realizing that a to-do app is not a new and innovative idea, I felt that conducting a competitive analysis would provide me with beneficial insights.
After conducting user interviews, competitive analysis, personas, and user journey maps, it became increasingly obvious that UI choices would play a big influence on the outcome of this project, because the app needed to be simple and easy to use while still being visually appealing.
I found that an easy-to-use quick select and sort feature would be extremely beneficial for the design of my app. To visualize this better, I created a site map.
With my site map complete, it was time to move onto designing!
✏️ Onto designing! ✏️
Sketching & Wireframing
I began with some quick, simple sketches I created on Procreate to start by getting some ideas down.
Then, I recreated my sketches on Adobe Illustrator to make them a little cleaner. (At the time of this project, my graphic design experience had caused me to be more comfortable with Adobe Illustrator and didn’t feel ready to move onto an interface design app quite yet).
Next, I moved onto my mid-fidelity prototypes, working on Adobe Xd. I added a pop of color for cohesion.
Conducting user testing and interviews on my mid-fidelity prototypes provided me with some helpful insights into what kind of app my users would like to use.
Final Screens
Once my hi-fidelity prototype was complete, I conducted user interviews to test them. Based off of these interviews, I found that my final product appeared intuitive, not too cluttered, and user-friendly.
Ultimately, my goal was to create a to-do app that had a clean, yet aesthetically pleasing UI to draw and keep users interested. I wanted features that most other to-do list apps don’t have as incentive for a user to want to download my app in particular. With my final iteration, I was able to reach this goal. The last of my user testers struggled to find negative feedback or improvements that could be made to the app. Through constant updating based on feedback, I feel that I have achieved a to-do list app that can provide the user with a wonderful experience.
Video Overview
Final Sentiments
To-Do you was my first UX portfolio project. I had created some screens in high school for our mobile news app (I actually pulled some assets from that one to reuse in this design), but I had never done wireframing or prototyping work on an interface designing app before this. I hold this project close to my heart because it taught me so much about what it means to be a UX Designer.
If I were to revisit this project, I think I would like to do some more research into how I can make this app stand out more amongst the large pool of competition it is pitted against. I think there are plenty of improvements that could be made, but that’s for another day.