Designed a mobile app that simplifies goal setting and task management for college students, from concept to completion. Leveraged AI to streamline goal creation, task management, and productivity, enhancing student efficiency through advanced technology solutions.
Many organization and study apps are overwhelming and require significant setup, which can deter college students from using them effectively.
The challenge was to reimagine goal and tasks apps to make them simple and intuitive, requiring minimal user input.
To gain insights into the project domain and college students, I employed the following methods:
Academic research underscores the importance of effective goal setting for improving student outcomes. Key findings include:
Secondary research showed that SMART goals significantly increases the chances of success.
I analyzed three popular task management apps to identify gaps and opportunities for Task Track. Although all three apps had great heuristics, none of the three implemented easy set up and structured goal setting as their main features.
Apps on the market lacked a SMART goal approach to organizing or managing tasks
Before gathering user insights, I conducted an assumptions mapping exercise to identify key assumptions for my survey:
Key assumption: Breaking down larger goals into smaller, manageable tasks significantly increases their perceived achievability and leads to higher success rates for students.
To clarify any assumptions or biases I conducted a online survey aimed at understanding current behaviors, pain points, and the potential impact of AI assistance. The survey had 30 participants and here are the key findings:
College students lacked formal goal-setting, felt overwhelmed by task creation, and were highly motivated by rewards.
I interviewed three college students to understand their goal-setting processes and identify barriers.
The interviews revealed common issues: students often have undefined goals lacking specificity, duration, and measurable aspects. They also identified procrastination, distractions, and time management as major barriers.
These insights informed my approach to creating a more structured and supportive goal-setting process to provide direction and alleviate these barriers.
We distilled our research into a persona and user journey map to empathize with our users. We identified that they experienced the most friction at the beginning. We aimed to make the goal-setting experience as seamless as possible.
Meet the “Overwhelmed overachiever”
We found that our college students felt most frustrated and overwhelmed during the goal-setting process.
Based on comprehensive research, including user interviews, literature review, and competitive analysis, we identified the primary issues faced by college students in achieving their goals: lack of specificity and structure in goal setting, significant procrastination, constant distractions, and poor time management.
Specific Issues to Address in Design:
Organizing the proposed features through a site map and information hierarchy enabled me to validate different user flows and identify how each feature could be accessed in the app.
This phase took a lot of time to make sure each design element was smooth and easy to use.
After prioritizing key features, I created user flows to test my design. This allowed me to conduct quick usability tests with my peers to ensure each element was placed on the correct screens.
I had to reiterate several times on this, asking my peers to complete different user flows.
I also created quick wireframes to further test my design with my peers. This clarified my design decisions on how each element was laid out and accessed.
I created quick wireframes to test my design with peers, clarifying how each element was laid out and accessed.
For the UI design of the app, I incorporated references to analog calendars using familiar colors and textures. I combined this with modern tech elements, using specific typography.
For the overall look and feel, I followed established design systems like Apple’s Fitness app, which are known for good heuristics and effectively displaying user progress. Additionally, I implemented a navigation system similar to popular social media apps for intuitive user experience.
I aimed for a utilitarian look and feel, showcasing progress toward goals on every screen.
I tested the app with two college students. Their feedback were:
Tests indicated the need for transparency in how the AI worked. I created an informational screen so users could see how tasks were broken down based on the backend prompt engineering.
The main goal of the app is make accomplishing goals and tasks to be easy and intuitive. Features that were created were:
I received positive feedback on the app’s visual design. Concerns were mainly about the performance of the generative AI in creating tasks and goals that would effectively help college students achieve their goals.
“This makes creating goals more easily and I wish this was fully functional!”
This project was a valuable exercise in leveraging emerging technologies to enhance user experiences with the app. I learned a lot about improving my design through constant feedback and iteration. While nothing is perfect, ongoing testing can lead to continuous improvement.
Things I would have done differently:
I would have liked to conduct more tests and develop metrics to measure the impact of my design.
