TaskAlly is a transformative application meticulously designed to help individuals overcome pressure and procrastination while tackling their tasks.
This innovative solution encompasses a dynamic social media community, empowering users to connect with like-minded individuals and receive mutual support in accomplishing their goals. Through personalized reminders and shared accountability with friends, this app fosters a motivating environment that aids in timely task completion, enabling users to embrace productivity and conquer obstacles along the way.
Protype Overview
Design Features
Onboarding
To-do list and shedule
Share tasks with friends
Edit posts
See your friends’ posts and send reminders
Get notifications from friends
Edit profile and find friends
Design Process
Problem Statement
How Might We make graduate students feel more responsible for achieving their goals?
For our team’s user research project, we conducted 5 in-person interviews of NYU graduate students to understand how they organize and manage their own tasks, and to see where there is a gap for improvement. We found that 100% of the students we interviewed reported that they are more likely to complete a task if they receive help or words of encouragement from friends or family. This led us to the idea that accountability partners are key. According to the American Society of Training and Development, social accountability increases the chances of accomplishment by 95% and provides a sense of extrinsic motivation.
Affinity Map
Ideation & Sketching
Lo-fi Prototype
Concept Testing
In order to test the idea of social accountability for goal achievement for our final solution, we performed 2 rounds of concept testing. The first round included 4 young professionals. We added them into an iMessage group chat together, and proceeded to tell them to share their to-do lists in the morning. Then throughout the day, they were told to hold each other accountable for the tasks on their to-do lists in order to finish their tasks on time. The second round included 2 people and simulated more of a one-on-one chat. The two people were told to put their task lists in the Facebook Messenger chat over the course of 3 days.
From the concept testing we found out 3 things:
- They enjoyed the experience because it gave them a window into their friend’s lives
- Throughout the day they started messaging less
- Most tasks were not scheduled and did not have a time
The concept testing led us to change two things about our initial sketch ideas:
- We should include nudges and reminders in regards to point #2.
- We may not need to include time slots for each of the tasks.
Usability Testing & Findings
Methodology: Thinking Aloud Testing
We had 6 participants test out our prototype, who are mostly students and office workers, in order to understand how clearly our interface is and what to improve on our design for our next step. There are 4 tasks for the users to complete:
- Create a new task in today’s to-do list and share with your friends.
- Cross off finished task and post
- Interact with one of your friends’ through unfinished tasks
- Comment on one of your friends’ posts
And we also asked questions about what are the likes and dislikes of our product, as well as any expected functions they would like to see in the future.
Most of our users struggled with the sharing page because the user flow is not clear enough, and functional icons are not well positioned. They also mention that they are expecting to see a notification function. And the way we separate friends and partners are pretty confusing.
Also includes feedback like:
- Add red dots on the calendar to indicate whether a day has a task or not.
- Add an option to make a task frequent or daily so users don’t need to write it down everytime.
- It seems like users heavily rely on others’ reminders. Adding a self management section like alarm and table can be a solution to keep the user themselves on track.
Journey Map
In order to better clarify how users will interact with our app, we created this journey map. At first, users have a strong desire to complete a task and everything goes smoothly when they start to do the task. But not a few times later, they get distracted by other things and can’t concentrate on doing their daily tasks. They feel unhappy and anxious inside for not doing the task and start to procrastinate. Here is when our TaskAlly comes, their friends will come and notify them. With a notification on users’ phone poping up, the users could get reminders and push them to go back to finish their tasks. In the end, the users go back to initial tasks and complete it with a sense of accomplishment and happiness. They will also share their accomplishments in TaskAlly with their friends.