Mind Your Time App

Mind Your Time is a fictional app I designed for the final project requirement in User Interface & Experience Design and Content Management Systems at Seattle Central to be a custom, data-driven mobile tool to reflect on time spent freelancing, studying, or volunteering. The result is a fully dedicated app site that includes a blog with posts about my inspiration, the app’s purpose, and persona research, as well as photo mockups and screenshots from my design.

• Project Role: Project Manager, Graphic Designer, Copywriter
• What I learned: App Design best practices, Productivity Techniques
• Tools Used: List any tools or software used

Background

I’ve always been fascinated by productivity and tracking. While studying Web Design at Seattle Central, one of my instructors strongly urged us all to track our time on projects, since that habit would serve us well in future employment. I started with a custom Google form and eventually added fields for paid and volunteer hours as well as coursework. The idea for Mind Your Time evolved out of my love for tracking hours spent and how I imagined it could all live in one place in an app.

The Problem & Aims

Tracking time can be done with a pencil and the back of an envelope, but collecting the data and viewing it over a week or longer is difficult to do. And the goal with Mind Your Time was not only to track time but also mood. I wanted to know how I felt after each activity, because that information can be used to inform decisions later on. If “knowing is half the battle” then knowing how I feel after doing a specific activity has helped me make informed decisions about whether not to continue doing that activity. The third pillar of Mind Your Time–after tracking time and mood–is to give users the tools to observe their trends. How many hours do they spend doing an activity and how often to they feel a certain way?

The Process & Alternative Solutions

In the world of productivity apps, there is a wide field of competition. For the app development, I did a lot of research on the existing landscape of productivity apps, tried out the ones I could, and assessed what I did and did not like. Since the the aim of the class was to design and not develop the app, I was able to dream big about options for data analysis and input that would require extensive user testing and prototyping.

Ultimate Solution & Results

Overall, designing an app was an incredibly rewarding experience. I spent a lot of time reading about best practices for app design and defining aspects of Mind Your Time in order to make it a potentially useful and unique product. The next time I design an app, I look forward to diving deeper into research of how and when users would interact with the product, knowing that there are several apps I have given up on because they were difficult to use or did not fulfill their intended purpose.

Categorized in: Case Study, Graphic Design, Project, UX Design, Web Design