Project Buddy
I was given the opportunity of designing a task management website for people seeking an easy and valuable experience in a task management app.
Task management is an organizational interface that can help many people like office managers, maintenance workers, IT personnel, designers, and more pin down different tasks in a project or a daily schedule.
One problem persists, however, many widely used Task management platforms like Trello and Asana have pretty steep, frustrating learning curves throughout, with many other issues interlaced.
The goal was to make a task management tool that would tip the scales in favor of the user in terms of simplicity and usefulness for workers, Blue Collar and White Collar. Making a more simplistic task management platform would help so many users in, scheduling, Facility management, HR, customer service, etc, and make using a task management app a not aneurysm-inducing program.
Insight and Research
Our first step was to get to know our users. As mentioned before, our target was simple and broad: both professional and trade workers. We set out by publishing surveys and conducting interviews. One challenge that was being presented was few were answering our surveys. Why? Users taking the survey were told that it would only take 10 to 20 minutes long, and our questions weren’t too complex. So what gives? Well, I made the mistake of putting the survey out to the wrong demographic. I posted the survey questions on my Instagram story hoping it would yield results but I found that many who saw and took the survey said they weren't in the work environment that would foster the use of the task management platform. We then decided that surveys should be directed toward people that had extensive job experience, thus increasing our chances of getting responses and more cohesive data. Luckily the interviewing process yielded much more fruit when we changed strategies. As expected, interviewees said they wanted a simple, clearcut task management experience, with no strings attached, no unnecessary, convoluted features, and more direction and feedback.
Early Stages
We began our low-fi wireframes by sketching out, as simply as possible, the home page and all associated features. We sketched out all possible Home page designs and listed them on the right are my sketches.
One pretty neat revelation we got from a beloved pizza franchise, a certain domino’s pizza, was to add a tracker at the top of every project or task grouping. This would be our most important feature.
Painting the Portrait
Low-Fidelity Home Page
True to our goals, the home screen would reveal projects right after log-in to prevent confusion and curb learning difficulties. While colors and aesthetic designs would be more refined later on, the skeleton of the home page would more or less remain the same, featuring the same three columns. for example, the task column would be a straightforward list of tasks.
Mid-Fi Home page
Changes made to mid-fi were making tasks and projects even more apparent throughout the user journey. All priority badges seen on low-fi were changed due to users mistaking them for buttons.
After testing with users, we had many revelations. Adding two views between a calendar to give the user a better idea of what to expect in the work week, and a Kanban to better organize tasks and projects thus reducing the stress of overwhelming workloads. Also an important note and lesson we could all learn is to add an eight pixel grid to the visual designs. Doing this made the website look a lot more professional and less amateur. This also made the page a lot more clear and less overwhelming.
Lessons Learned
Users preferred skipping the bells and whistles in lieu of better usability and functionality. For example, us scrapping the color-coded priority badges and instead add exclamation point icons (see example on the right).
User testing is extremely important and useful and should never be overlooked or skipped, and should be done as much as possible to stay in the loop of what users want.
Web apps are significantly more difficult to design depending on what the subject matter is. In this case, very difficult.
Did We Achieve Our Goal of Making it Simple?
I would say we definitely did. Making our UI much cleaner and organized as opposed to Asana and Trello and getting rid of distracting elements proved our app worthy of the motto “simple and easy to use.”