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Busy Button
Role
Primary Designer
Duration
12 weeks
Design Objective
To create a tool that helps you stay motivated so you can complete personal and shared tasks efficiently.
At the start of this year, I read an interesting statistic. In January 2021, 23.2% of total workers in the US were working from home. Almost a quarter of the workforce was working from home. Which led my inquisitive design mind to ask the question:
How can we make working from home more ideal?
This project, conducted as a passion project outside of school, takes a deep dive into answering this particular question. Here is what I achieved and how I got here.
01 The Problem
To explore the problem space, we talked to people to understand their frame of mind while working from home.
From the various interviews, I mapped the journeys to see common pain points.
Few themes emerged as common:
Difficulty in collaboration with team members
Difficulty in staying motivated and concentrating
Difficulty in establishing a work-life balance
To compare my findings from a small group of people to the general sentiment of the workforce, I looked at surveys. Many of the same problems became evident.
From our research, it seemed that concentration and collaboration were the two main pain points across various industries and ages.
Next, we wanted to compare different apps in the market that claimed to resolve these problems. We compared them against 8 different crteria and charted them on a spider map.
While most apps were easy to use there was space for innovation in the collaboration and story telling areas. We knew we had to cater to this market.
02 Design Development
With these essential functions in mind, we started to prototype our deisgns.
We wanted the idea of status update to be central to our app concept. So I started with a huge button on top that was easily accesible, to comply with Fitt's Law.
We also created groups to organize shared tasks.
I added a journaling component to help users transition from the work day to a period of rest. However, it felt that we were digressing from what the app was meant to do. We ended up scrapping the idea of journaling.
With the basic structure of the app configured, we went on to flesh out all the functions of the appp and build the information architecture.
In the first iteration, attention was given to the status button.
We also developed a theme around the phrase 'as busy as a beaver'. Although it was meant to add character to the app, testing showed that it felt childish.
Feedback also said that the buttons were too wordy and confusing.
Following the feedback from user testing, we toned down the colors and character, to emphasize more on function and reduce confusion. We shifted focus from the status button to building a home page that concentrated on organization of groups and tasks.
03 Concept Proposal
The home page now displays all your colonies on one page. A do not disturb slider allows you to notify all your colonies at once. You are able to see your tasks for the day with any tags that you might have used.
You can update your status within a particular colony by clicking on the busy button. You can also send a quick text to a fellow colony member. There are additional settings to add and remove members, mute or leave the colony.
You can access tasks from the home page or from the quick access menu. You can customize to add Pomodoro timer, priority, and various tags. When you start a task, your beaver starts building a new dam. If you leave the task before your desired task is completed, your dam breaks!
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