Clocky
Designing a time management app to help users plan and schedule their personal and professional commitments
Background
For my Analytical Methods in Human Factors course, I worked in a team with five other members to design and evaluate a schedule app to help users with time management for a semester-long project. My role included designing the Qualtrics questionnaire, developing the user personas, moderating usability testing sessions, conducting risk analysis and root cause analysis, and designing the onboarding and goals pages for the interactive prototype. The final report can be viewed here.
Problem Statement
Existing time management applications offer varying features and resources, resulting in the need for a single application that allows users to combine all of their personal and professional scheduling needs in one place with an emphasis on social connectivity and sharing group availability with other users.
Preliminary Research
The guiding research objective was to investigate what challenges people (18+) face when using schedule planning tools, and to identify which features and capabilities they wish were included in schedule planning tools. This involved administering a Qualtrics questionnaire to gain insights into user preferences, needs, and pain points with existing schedule planning tools, conducting gap analysis based on the questionnaire responses, and conducting in-depth interviews with questions tailored to insights gained from the gap analysis.
“It's hard to find a good scheduling app with fleshed
out features”
“I want a tool that has more ways I can customize it instead of just generic features”
"I wish I could see other people's availability in one place so it's easy to make plans/schedule meetings"
"I think there should be one tool that can synchronize with other apps so scheduling is more centralized"
College-attending participants were the most concerned with work-life balance, and simplistic group coordination and communication.
Older participants expressed a strong interest in being able to monitor their physical health and wellbeing.
Research Insights
Based on the insights from the questionnaire results and the interview responses, we used a Miro board to create affinity diagrams, empathy maps, journey maps, and user personas.
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Users do not have a streamlined solution for planning collaborative projects
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Users feel ill equipped to manage work/life balance
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Users wish to add healthy habits to their routine like exercise and meal planning
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Users do not have elegant solutions to rescheduling or managing last-minute plans
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Users want to be able to schedule events based on everyone's availability and automatically create an event in the same page
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Users want social connectivity integration to view friends/family availabilities and schedules
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Users want integrated features such as traffic and weather reports
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Users want more opportunities for customization
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Alerts and reminders are the most important aspect of schedule planning tools for users
Design Solution (1st Iteration)
We developed an app prototype that allows users to coordinate all their personal and professional schedules in a single app. We intended for our app design to focus on social networking and letting users share group availability with each other. We started with initial market research to generate ideas, in which we analyzed some of the most well-known related apps, like Calendly, When2Meet, and Google/Apple Calendar. Each team member came up with various ideas and functionalities that would make the app better for users. Our initial outline and wireframes showed the basic structure and function of our app. Then, we completed the detailed mockup and final prototype. Finally, we finished the final prototype, which allowed us to test functionality and usability, and complete later evaluation and modifications.
Customizable accessibility settings
Create new groups and add upcoming events
Set work and personal availability for others to view
Create new goals and track daily and overall progress
Customizable alerts to stay on track
Master calendar to overview schedule and upcoming events
Set and view group availability to coordinate and easily plan events
Task Analysis & Risk Analysis
Our team conducted a task analysis in order to better map out and understand the tasks that would be needed for a user to accomplish their goals with our app, as well as to document the steps in our workflow. We categorized them into 6 use scenarios of Onboarding, Navigating, Managing Groups, Setting Goals, Managing Availability, and Scheduling. Finally, we listed the tasks in order of cognitive flow, beginning with the required steps of account creation and ending with successfully scheduling an event. After completing our task analysis, our team then conducted a risk analysis on all of the tasks identified. This risk analysis was based on our findings from our initial interviews and survey, our usability testing interviews, and our online research. Our format and scale was a standard 5x5 matrix with severity and likelihood.
Most risks pertained only to user errors in using the interface and had low severity but high likelihood, with a majority of scores landing between 1-4
Larger risks between 5-8 included shared and unprotected login information, and insufficient privacy settings, all of which had higher severity but low likelihood
Usability Testing
We produced a usability testing protocol for feedback on our medium-fidelity prototype. The protocol contained instructions for in-person interviews using the Figma app and the iPhone screen recording feature to capture the participants’ interactions. The protocol includes pre-test questions, usability tasks, root cause analysis interview guidelines, and post-test questions. We recruited five participants in the Boston area to perform in-person tests. Our criteria required the participants to be working professionals. In addition to screen recording, we recorded the tests with a camera facing the participant’s face.
Root Cause Analysis
To conduct root cause analysis, we created a spreadsheet to document the type of use error, description of use error, description of task, root cause analysis, and usability testing notes identified with the use error. While conducting root cause analysis, our team identified 11 instances of assistance, 8 use errors, and 4 close calls. We used the following criteria to classify types of use errors:
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Close Call: Almost finished successfully
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User Error: Task unfinished or not finished as intended
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Instance of Assistance: User required prompting from moderator to complete the task
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Success: User completed the task with no assistance
Post-Task Interviews
“The interface is easy to navigate and I like the color scheme”
“The group availability feature is super useful and convenient, especially for people in college”
"I could see myself using this app because it combines the best parts of When2Meet and Calendly"
"I think it's pretty helpful to have the different features from other apps located all in the same place"
We conducted structured post-task interviews with each testing participant to gather subjective feedback for what they found positive about the prototype, and to identify areas for modification for the second iteration,
“There's way too many colors, buttons, and icons it feels crowded and confusing”
“I think there's just too many features it seems kind of complicated to use”
"There's an excessive number of tabs, I don't think the different view options are really necessary"
"I would stick with the tools I already use because this app is just overwhelming for me"
Design Solution (2nd Iteration)
We completed one round of design interactions based on testing feedback. Below is a list of changes and images of the new “calendar”, “groups”, and “edit availability” pages:
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Added a comprehensive onboarding process that included a tutorial for using the calendar feature.
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Removed the “edit overview” button originally seen on the “calendar” tab to make “availability editing” only accessible from the “groups” tab.
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Gave “friends” and “shared availability” a dedicated page under the “groups” tab.
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Reduced the repetition, saturation, and brightness of the colors on the app.
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Replaced the settings icon with a hamburger menu, and removed the appearance of the icon on event and goal editing pages.
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Removed the navigation bar from the settings and event and goal editing pages.
