Slate-it

Keeping up to date with ever changing teachings, diets, fads, and methodologies is exhausting.In my determination to do so, I noticed two things:

1. I spend hours researching, looking to field experts, gurus, or celebrities who inspire me. I then spend more time organising and building new plans to follow. In essence, I try to “copy” the people I lookup to.
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2. Sticking to my new routine wouldn’t last long either and I would yet again find myself trying to reinvent myself as my lifestyle and responsibilities change with time. For example, I would want to focus on mymeditation practice inJanuary but shift focus to getting back into heavy weights training 5 time a week the month after.

How can our app enable self-discovery, growth and productivity in an information age?

I first carried out competitor research as I believe there is a lot to learn from tried and tested solutions already available. I explored the available habit tracking, calendar and productivity app. Seven possible competitors were evaluated.

As I wanted deeper understand human habit, I read Charles Duhigg book “The Power of habit”, many research papers and even more articles. I studied the habit Mechanism (triggered by cues, lead into a routine and culminate in rewards), keystone habits, willpower, behavioural science, Intrinsic vs Extrinsic motivators and more.

Now that I understood both the science and the available apps, I decided to go straight to the source of truth, the users themselves.

I sent out a screener survey and from the 32 responses, I selected six user interview participants. They were above 16 and used a combination of handwritten task lists/schedules and apps. The objective of the interviews was to identify how users view, strategise and achieve self-improvement and find solutions that could support and improve their current processes.

I took all the data from the six interviews and created a sticky note affinity map on Miro. Each sticky note represented a user quote or insight that struck me as important. Once I had all the insight in front of me I started to see common patterns that I grouped together.

These insights gave me a deep understanding of our potential users and four key insights that later became the building blocks of the solution.

This insight helped create an empathy map that allowed me to get into the shoes of potential customers. To make sure I was deeply empathising with what they would think and feel, understanding their pain points and concerns. I knew this would allow me to later create solutions with the user at its core.The empathy map led to the creation of two user personas.

The main 4 insights were reframed and a new problem space was identified

To help navigate through all possible ideas and features. I wrote all userstories out. 45 stories were identified and then prioritised to determinewhat to include in the MVP.

Now that the MVP was defined, the sitemap was drawn up to clarify the apps goals before designing the solution.

This got me thinking about how the user would navigate through the app to accomplish all the red routes defined in the MVP.

This thinking naturally led to the creation of the user flows. User flows map out every step of the users journey as they try accomplish a task on the app.

With the MVP defined, and its associated user flows mapped out, it was time to move onto early sketching and ideation. To move fast and not limit the creative process, low fidelity designs were drawn by hand. I used sticky notes to layer and a few colours to highlight interactive elements.

With the sketches complete it was time to bring them to life as low fidelity, black and white wireframes on Figma. You can see the side by side comparison of a few key screens below.

This insight helped create an empathy map that allowed me to get into the shoes of potential customers. To make sure I was deeply empathising with what they would think and feel, understanding their pain points and concerns. I knew this would allow me to later create solutions with the user at its core.The empathy map led to the creation of two user personas.

I then created a Fully functioning greyscale low fidelity prototype of the V1 MVP prototype to run Guerilla Usability Tests on.

The low fidelity prototype wasn’t pixel perfect but helped to quickly gauge what worked and didn’t before I dived any further. Guerrilla tests were carried out with 5 participants at a friends home gathering. Given the spread of the corona virus, scope to recruit random users at coffee shops etc was limited.

The following usability changed were made after this early testing:
1. Privacy of creator content(Schedules) were addressed (cant always be public)
2. Introduced concept of a “Collection of schedules”
3. Improved visibility and clarity in regard to schedule commitments on personal calendars
4. Confusing around the label "schedules" - unclear wording.

Now it was time for the prototype to come to life. The prototype was based on the solution sketch and incorporated the findings from the guerrilla tests.

First the app was named - Slate-it, and brand identity exercises were carried out. Then a mood board was designed to get an idea of colour and feel.

From there, the brand platform and style guide was written up to define the visual language of the app and ensure clarity and consistency between screens. Logos, Typography, colour palettes, Grids, icons, UI elements and imagery were defined.

A few animations were added to micro interactions to give the application life
• The Fab expanding
• The “love” button

I then created a high fidelity prototype of the V1 MVP which had all necessary functionality for the 5 red routes.
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The goal of the prototype was to quickly test the new designs and iterate on the user feedback. The red routes were tested using 2 rounds of usability tests, with a total of 10 participants. The test were all carried out remotely. In both instances, users were asked to complete 5 tasks

1. Add, view, and edit their calendar tasks, events, and schedules.
2. Imagine you’d like to get into/back into a fitness routine - Find a schedule that will get you off the couch.  
3. Imagine you choose to start training to run a marathon and would like to start off completing your first 2 miles - Find a schedule that would help you do this and add it to your calendar.
4. Create your own schedule.
5. Imagine you created a schedule “Bedtime Reading” last week which is publicly available. You decide you would like to keep this schedule private - find the “Bedtime Reading” schedule you created last week and make it private.

The results from the first round of testing was synthesized and the reported issues were ranked by priority. These were the "major" issues identified in the test report.

The main and recurring issue amongst the testers was the use of the word “Schedule”. Action and noun confusion.

Alternatives descriptors were then considered:
• Program
• Course
• Preset

The project was more complex to design than fist anticipated as it is a hybrid between a private/personal calendar app and asocial app facilitating the creation and sharing of schedules among users.

Limit and define your project scope at the beginning - I found myself overwhelmed by the amount of possible functionality and choosing which aspects to focus on given the project constrained (1 person team/time). By stripping it down to an MVP and focusing on just the red routes, I was able to manage the project well in the end. I should have ideally been a lot clearer about the scope at the start.

Testing is more precious than gold - I truly experienced that value of testing the product as throughly and as frequently as possible in my design process. I was able to course correct many time and was essential to creating a product that is truly usefuland delightful.

To keep iterating! To keep testing and validating the ideas and solutions I have chosen, to move onto V2 of the product adding more features - collections (group of schedules), comment threads, reviews and ratings and to do more user research into our content creators Persona to ensure their experience is smooth.