Multipurpose Tracker
What if the Forefathers of Organization —Reminders, Mint, and Google Calendar— each lent their best genes to a multipurpose tracking app?
Then, we’d have Tracker, a know-it-all (in a good way!) task manager promoting holistic organization while reducing app-switching fatigue.
UX & Software Development Studio | Cornell University | December 2018
Key Responsibilities:
Market Research, Affinity Mapping, Prototyping, Design Rationale, User Testing Script, User Interviews
Background
Pop quiz! What’s my name?
There’s quite a lot to remember in our Age of Information, but we forget 70% of the new information that we’ve encountered within one day of exposure.
According to the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, the relationship between retention and time-since-learning is an unhappy one. Granted, the statistics are less severe when information is contextualized with personal relevance and repetition of exposure, but, nonetheless, there is a pressing problem space here.
Intrigued by the ease of forgetting, my classmates Isabelle De Brabanter, Jungwon Shin, Grace Song, Jeffrey Tsang, Angela Zheng, and I banded together in Software Development Studio and set out to design a memory aide to help humans forget about remembering logistics —but not without naming our team Git and Tonic first! Tracker soon became a trusted device through which to share the burden of memory.
The best products are built with empathy… and who better to empathize with than ourselves? We designed Tracker for the typical college student, pelted with deadlines while wrestling with the demands of daily life. Tracker aimed to release time and energy spent remembering academic, medical, and financial responsibilities.
Problem Definition
To understand our target audience and the patterns in their challenges, we grouped common user problems, goals, and preferences into an affinity map. This surfaced 3 clusters of information that students regularly struggled to remember: responsibilities related to studying, taking routine medications, and managing spending.
Through user research, we learned that students relied on an assortment of applications to track various tasks, budgets, and deadlines. Ironically, this led to individual tasks being overlooked in the midst of multiple entry points and application-switching. Cue Tracker, offering one-stop organization through a familiar interface!
Early Sketches
Behind every great design is a stack of papers bleeding Sharpie ink.
We began to visualize Tracker by sketching out many, many sample screens (a small subset is pictured below).
We gained some insights from this stage of the design process:
Not all imagined features can —or should— be translated into reality. It’s helpful to discover this at the onset.
Defining the navigational structure of an application ensures alignment with overall goals.
Sketching helps facilitate communication around feasibility and complexity between designers and coder, even if messy!
Prototypes
With rough sketches of the screens of Tracker, we created a medium-fidelity prototype with refined user actions. We smoothed out an ideal user journey, beginning to form opinions on the UI and layout of each screen.
Even in the short span between sketching and prototyping, we revisited our design rationale and excluded certain features from the latest iteration: the “Click to See Detail” drop-down on the Home screen, “Metrics” drop-down on the Task Input screen, and pie chart on the Reports screen among them, all identified as non-essential distractors.
Design Iteration
After prototyping came validating.
Of course, Git and Tonic thought the world of Tracker, but we had to be sure that the world agreed. So, we embarked on ~12 user interviews with a standardized script and action-based prompts. Our goal was to identify which of our designed features were intuitive and effective, which ones weren’t, and how to bridge the gap.
Sample Prompt: Suppose you want to remind yourself to run for 1 hour later today. You don’t think that this fits any of the existing categories. How could Tracker help?
Expected User Journey: Clicking “Add New Category;” then, enter running for an hour as a task under a newly-created category.
Sample Prompt: Suppose you normally take daily vitamins after lunch, around 1:00pm, and you don’t want to miss a day. You’re not willing to enter this into Tracker every day, but you want to see it every day without having to manually repeat task input. How could Tracker help?
Expected User Journey: Use the “Repeat” functionality within the Task Input screen to add daily recurrence to taking vitamins.
Final Design
The design process described above led to a set of intuitive screens that met our original goal: helping our peers forget about remembering the little things.
Our MVP included features supporting the creation of various types of tasks with various frequencies as well as visualization of aggregate trends to promote self-awareness.
Task Input Screen
Academic Task Entry
Successful Task Entry to Master List on Home Page
Master Task List, with Completed/Delete Options
Home Page with Medicine Reminder, Academic Task
Spend Tracking Screen
Task Marked as Complete
Analytics Screen, with Task Progress for October
In Hindsight…
Having had several years to mull over the design and implementation of Tracker, I see some room for improvement.
Here’s a non-comprehensive list of items that might make Tracker more marketable and effective in its purpose.
Give Tracker a catchier name. Sometimes, single-word, no-frills application names fare well, but a jazzier name would distinguish Tracker from its competitors.
Update the coloring of the “Home” button in the bottom navigation bar to match the non-active tabs.
The navigational button for “Home” is constantly darker than the remaining 3. This color-divergence confounds a user as to whether he’s “Home” right now.
Display units of measurement per metric shown in the Analytic tab.
As is, a user may be forced to ask: does “Medicine 1/1” mean number of medicines or numbers of times per day medicine was supposed to be taken?
Fix the “Repeat” functionality so that it does not display X instances of a single task on the Task Input screen (bug not pictured). This functionality is meant to add a task only once to the Home screen and signal that it is recurring.
Consider including guardrails to promote healthier usage of Tracker, e.g., blocking users from setting a December budget in September
Overall, I have renewed belief in the need for Tracker, but there is work to be done to guarantee that all of its features coexist peacefully and productively.
To our credit, I still love the calm blue that we chose for our UI. Cheers, Git and Tonic! 🥂