I was planning to learn UX design for such a long time and finally here is my first UX design project: Lakshya, an app which allows an user to manage their time easily by creating your goals and breaking them down into small tasks. UX design always interested me and being a front-end developer I think UX design skill will definitely come in handy.

I am really thankful for the Springboard for their wonderful course which has amazing curricullum and a very supportive mentorship programme.

My mentor during my journey was André Martin to whom I can’t thank enough. He constantly supported me to climb the steep learning curve of UX design.

It is the begining of 2018 and during this time of the year everyone looks for ways and methods to achieve their resolution. So this project is my approach on how I would like to solve the problem of time management.

What does the app aims to solve?

One thing me and my friends struggle a lot is with time management. We all have personal goals we want to achieve but fail to do so because we fail to manage and prioritize our personal time.

My assumption was that mainly everyone struggles in time management due to following reasons

• Lack of Motivation/Agenda
• Softly defined long-term goals
• Lack of time management skills.

Using these assumptions as my reference I set out to solve this problem. To gain a better understanding about the problem, I started interviewing them which I have outlined in next section.

Who is the king? User

I realised in the very begining of learning UX that users are always important during a product creation process. It is very important to seek constant user’s feedback and understand their point of view at every stage.

I interviewed 4 candidates face-2-face and 15 using the survey questions.

Please find the results of survey here

Following were the insights from the user-interview process:

1. People generally used ticktick(mobile app), pen and paper or simple notepad to keep track of tasks they want to perform.
2. People generally prefer very easy to use method to manage their time, they want to avoid any learning curve which involves inlearning new method.
3. People generally have 2–4 long term goal and 3–5 short term goal.
4. People fail to achieve their personal goals because they don’t do enough planning for it and time allotment.
5. Another reason I found why people fail is the lack of motivation half-way.

Overall interview process was a fun and unique learning experience. It was a good starting point for my journey of building a product. It also helped me in creating user-stories and features for my product.

I also created two personas and empathy-maps out of my user-surveys.

My real but not-so-real friends — Personas

I used these personas as my compass every time I ponder about the feature and feel of the product.

Why two personas?

I wanted the app to be easy-to-use and understand by everybody. So I created two personas which reflected techies(Jim) and non-techie(Janet).

Janet feels overwhelmed by technology but she has goals to achieve in her life whereas Jim eats and breaths technology and wants to achieve more in his life.

User-stories

Since I am also a front-end developer I understand the importance of a well written user-stories and feature mapping. I created these user stories keeping in mind the personas I mentioned above. I also thought about some features that I would love to see in the future releases of my product

See complete list of user-stories here

Card-sorting

One thing was very clear to me since the start of the process, I wanted to design my entire product keeping the user in driver’s seat. So, again I went back to user’s to find out, how they would like to struture the app on the basis of user-stories that I created. To find this out I used ard-sorting technique.

Card-sorting technique helped identify number of screens should I have in my app and what each screen should do.

I asked 4 users to perform card-sorting technique for my app and discovered that majority of them wanted to see features divided among these screens-

1. Dashboard — Landing page, it displays user’s progress and upcoming tasks.
2. Goal’s screen — Screen to add new goals
3. Task’s screen — Screen to add new tasks.
4. Setting screen — This screen allows users to tweak user’s settings like updating profile, changing reminder tone etc.

User-flows

I had a general idea about the screens that I should have in my product, but after card-sorting I was confident about it. So now it was time to create an user-flow which involves defining user’s journey in the product. User-flow laid groundwork for the next crucial step which was wireframing. I was now able to visualize how app was taking the shape and coming to life.

High-fidelity wireframes —

I was missing my users again, and wanted to seek their feedback on the

wireframes. But I also wanted to perform usability-testing on these wireframes. So I quickly mocked the pen-paper wireframes to proto.io. I added interactions among the screens as these will give me a better sense of understanding of how users will interact with the product.

Usability-testing

I was so happy about my decision to seek user’s feedback of the wirframes and user-flows. The insights that I gained during 3 interviews that I had were so helpful. The usability teting helped me in two ways -

1. Confidence on current design — I was really happy that they were able to ‘grasp’ the objective of application by just using the wireframes.
2. Minor details —It also helped me discover features that I thought user might find useful were not at all important to user.

Following were the general questions that I asked during the interviews

1. What do you think about this screen?
2. What would you do after landing on this screen?
3. If app like this existed, would you use it? Why?
4. How was your overall experience of using the app?
5. Which features you liked most about the app?

Following were the changes that I amended after usability-testing —

1. I used high quality images which felt more connected to the product rather than generic images that I used earlier. This suggestion helped me to give the product an unique look.
2. I almost missed one scenario when user completes all the task in a goal, added that.
3. Shorten goal creation process.
4. Removed unnecessary texts which gave the app a very clean look.
5. Added more info about app on the landing screen.

You gotta have a style guide!

I decided to use green color for primary actions to indicate positivity and progress

I chose green color as it gives feeling of progress and positivity. I have chosen red color to show urgency of goals.

Final design

Constantly seeking feedback from the users at every step gave me immense confidence about the design of the product. I was less doubtful whether users would like the app or not because I knew users had majorly contributed in the structuring of this product. I was also surprised how I created the design which were completely different from what I had in mind initially. This was mainly due to using the users as a compass and not allowing my biases to come in the way.

Next steps

I want to work more and improve on this idea after hearing feedback from kind world of internet ;)

I will definitely try to convert into a real world app as I really want to help my everyone and myself to get things done and achieve goals.

Let’s get in touch

Got any feedback I would love to hear that.
Want to see more of my work head to www.jitenagarwal.com