Redesign for How People
Experience and Manage Time
A Design Project of Interaction Design Specialization
by UC San Diego and Coursera.
The Design Roadmap of this Project
The Challenge
Finding Opportunities to Redesign How People Manage Time
User observation
Focus on observing how people spend/schedule/plan their time at night.
◆ Research methods:
- AEIOU
User Testing
In-person testing
Key Insights
- People tend to take both the icon and the text that describe the icon as bounded together and clickable.
People are expecting that “next step related” buttons should be at right sides, and vice versa.
A/B testing
Experiment: The button for “Discover” recommended activities should be appear before or during user adding events?
Design Tools:
JustInMind - for rapid App prototyping
UserTesting.com - for A/B testing online
PowToons - for rapid video making for visualizing concept development
Introducing
Chronos
Chronos is an app that aims at helping people dominate their night time, to schedule events at night more smoothly and efficiently. No matter you are still be overwhelmed by tasks at night or just feel that night life is same old same,
Chronos can help to balance your life.
The Challenge
Finding Opportunities to Redesign How People Manage Time
Starting from the beginning, the original design brief of this project is to discover how people experience “Time” nowadays, and hope to find any opportunity to redesign or “Change” the way how people manage time.
Since the scope of this challenge is big, in order to scale things down the project focused on observing people’s activities in their “night life” and getting insights from this aspect.
The Design Process
User Observation
I focused on observing how people spend/schedule/plan their time at night.
Research Method
-
AEIOU
There were overall 3 users I observed. For 2 of them I observed them in person with AEIOU method to help me recorded their activities at night.
-
Diary Research with AEIOU
For one of the users who I couldn’t observed in person, I conducted diary research with an AEIOU format Google form to help her record her activities and also my research.
Clips of Diary Study with AEIOU Google form
Insight from the Observation
After observation and interview conducted, the 3 users I found above could be classify into two types:
People who are still busy at night
2 users I observed were a freelancer and a graduated school student. They were usually still got overwhelmed by lots of tasks at night like household stuff or homework, and didn’t have enough time to fully relax.
People who are bored at night
One of the users is an retired businessman, he usually got lots of leisure time at night but found that every night was same old same and feel every minute is meaningless.
From above user observation I induce the user needs and develop the point of view as following:
Preface
Night time could means differently to different individual.
Some people find that they still got overwhelmed by lots of tasks after work and don’t have enough time to relax at night. While some people are completely free at night, they don’t have too much idea for activities at night, for them every night is same old same and wish it could be more diverse.
Point of View
No matter how busy a person is or how free a person is at night,
night time should not be intense or boring.
Night time should be a time to relax, to refresh, and to refill one’s energy for tomorrow. With good scheduling and planning, everyone should manage their night life smoothly, diversely, meaningfully, and make the most of it.
Storyboard
I created two storyboards which show 2 scenarios for 2 types of users:
Storyboard #1
the one who are extremely busy at night
Storyboard #2
the one who just have no idea what to do at night
From the 2 storyboards above the paper prototyping of a mobile app was developed with 2 core solutions:
An Events count down page
Help user to stick on their planned schedule, get important things done on time, and could have more time to fully relax.
A Discover page
For people who usually don’t have idea for what to do at night, this page would recommend activities to users based on what they’re interested.
The paper prototyping shows the overall design flow of the App: Chronos
Heuristic Evaluation
I conducted Heuristic Evaluation to 2 types of users for improving my paper prototype, hoping that this could improve the diversity of the feedback.
General User
The first was that I invited one of my friend (who didn’t have knowledge about Heuristic Evaluation) to give feedback for my prototype, and I mapped his thought and opinions to different heuristic violations.
Professional User
The other way was to conduct heuristic evaluation with my peer who have knowledge to it, so she would give me feedback based off the 10 heuristics.
The Result
After collecting all great feedbacks from peers, I created a list of changes based off the heuristics evaluation, which are mainly related to
Use Familiar Metaphors & Language Flexibility,
Clean and Functional design,
Freedom,
Show Status Recognition Over Recall,
Prevent Errors,
Error Recovery and Provide Help,
and applied them to improve my prototype.
The place I conducted heuristics evaluation for my paper prototype.
For peers who couldn’t do evaluation at my place,
we did it via online video chat and it just worked well.
Here I applied Justinmind Prototyper for rapid mobile app prototyping.
Not only it provide several devices platform you can choose to simulate your prototype (like desktop website, android, ios.), but it suit for either programmer or designer who didn’t have any programing background. It just visualizes every programing stuff into a manner of “tap and drag”, which make designers much easier and faster to create a highly interactive prototype instead of spending tons of time in coding.
Implementation
Clips of JustInMind Prototyper
User Testing
2 sages of the testing plan were conducted (In person user testing and A/B testing) for the mobile app prototype.
In Person User Testing
For In Person User Testing, a testing protocol was developed to keep the same test is conducted in a consistent manner, and 2 representative testers were invited to join the user testing.
A/B Testing
The following are the plan for my A/B testing.
- Experiment -
The button for “Discover” recommended activities should be appeared
before or during user adding events?
Here I used UserTesting.com to conduct A/B test. I assigned 2 of participants for version A and the other 2 for version B to test which version would get the most clicked for teh "Discover" button.
Key Screens of Chronos
Fit and Finish
Home screen of Chronos
Add Events and set duration
Activities Discover Page
Event Count Down Page for
helping users to stick on their schedule
The Overall Reflection for this Design Project
User Needs Aspects - A more positive way for scheduling
Most scheduling related apps are making user to plan their schedule in a negative way, i.e. users just need to plan their life by their own. However Chronos provide a more positive way to help users to plan their schedule. Users can not only add their planned tasks, but discover what they can do recommended by Chronos based on what they are interested in. Another positive way is that Chronos provide an “Events Count Down” feature which let users can stick on their schedule if they want to.
Marketing Aspects – Prompt commercial at the right time
The “Discover Page” in Chronos is actually inspired by a Taiwanese events ticketing website Accupass, so for the stretched scenario is that the Ads/Commercial promotion could be integrate into “Discover Page”, for example letting users to directly book an event ticket in the “Discover Page” and it would be automatically added to the users’ schedule.
Scaling Up to Planning Daily Life
Finally although Chronos is an app that is designed for users to plan their night life, the scenario will not be limited to scheduling night time, it can be scaled up to planning daily life. This is what this design project could be focus on next, and pivot to the new point of view for the further development in the future.
Point of View
Paper Prototyping
After several changes and polishing based on the previous testing, here comes the final prototype of Chronos.
URL: https://www.justinmind.com/usernote/tests/28999238/31727626/31727628/index.html
Chronos
Chronos is a name of an ancient Greek god who governed linear and chronological time, just like this app — Chronos, it can help you dominate your night time, to schedule your events at night more smoothly and efficiently. No matter you are still be overwhelmed by tasks at night or just feel that your night life is same old same, Chronos can help to balance your life.
You would first add events you plan to do, or just discover activities recommended by Chronos. After you’ve done adding your to-do list, you would finally go into an “Event count down” page which show that how much time remain for the current tasks and what’s the event coming up next, to help you stick on track on your planned schedule and hence complete it smoothly.
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