Task Quest
Overview
Battle your to-do lists one task at a time with this interactive mobile task app.
Team
Aubrey Min - UX / UI Designer
Jacqui Kim - UX / UI Designer
Sharon Navarro - UX / UI Designer
Selene LaMarca - UX Researcher / UI Designer
Duration
Three weeks.
Tools
Miro, Figma, InVision, Google Slides, Trello, Adobe Creative Cloud
The goal of this project was to create an app to help with an everyday problem. Starting with the statement, “I wish I had an assistant to help me keep track of tasks,” we began focusing our research on the question of
“How might we help young professionals organize their tasks while keeping them motivated?”
Task Quest is a story-based task management app designed to help users prioritize their to-do lists and stay motivated to complete their goals.
User Center Design Approach
User Center Design is a nonlinear process to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and come up with innovative solutions to prototype and test. This way of thinking is most effective when dealing with problems that are not well-defined or unknown. The five phases are: research, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
Research
Who is the Target Audience?
To understand where we are starting, the team discussed our users based on habits, demographic, and lifestyles. With all this information, we created our hypothesis.
Proto Persona
With our assumptions and observations written out, we created a Proto Persona.
User Interviews
To better understand the pain points and gain empathy for our target group, we conducted user interviews.
During our interviews, we framed questions to allow for conversation geared towards gaining insight into their experience with task management and what tools and/or apps they may use in the process. Below is common feedback we received from users.
Google Survey
As we were working on the interview questions, I had the idea of creating a Google Survey that we could share via social media and email to reach a larger pool of data. With our short window of time, I led in breaking up tasks and organizing the team to complete our user interview questions and survey questions.
Selection of Questions and Response from Survey
What are the biggest challenges of your organizational style?
“I end up making a list that is way too long and difficult to complete…I get overwhelmed and distracted because I don't feel like doing all these things”.
“I can make too many lists or forget about them especially if I don’t write it down and only use my list app on my iPhone.”
Results and Findings from Survey
Within a few days, we had a total of 36 responses. The data surprised us as we learned that about half of our users created a written to-do list each day and only 16% used an app.
Affinity Map Diagram
To help us understand our research from user interviews and the survey, we created an affinity map in Miro to visually represent the thoughts of the users. I led the discussion and helped create the categories of the key insights.
Competitor Analysis
We conducted Competitor Analysis on four different task management apps. One competitor, Forest, stood out the most as it gave the users incentives as they completed tasks on the app. As they completed their tasks, they would plant and take care of trees in a forest. This incentive was enticing and received great reviews from users.
Definition and Ideation
Through this research, we came up with the Problem Statement of the users.
Problem Statement
Some young professionals, who define success as completing tasks, struggle with prioritizing, organizing, and recognizing their progress in completing their goals. They feel overburdened because they are often forgetful and use too many tools to track their tasks. As a result, they feel unmotivated and unorganized, leaving them with uncompleted tasks. How might we help people prioritize their tasks, keep them notified, and make them feel accomplished?
Concept Idea
With this information, I kept asking myself, “How can this app be different from a checklist?” Ruminating over the Forests app and adventure video games, I wondered, “What if we make a story-based app that as the users complete tasks, they progress in a story?” I brought this to the team, and they loved the idea and ran with it.
Concept Summary
This story-based task manager app allows users to defeat creatures called Distractors by completing tasks on their to-do lists. With every creature defeated, the kingdom will evolve and expand as they battle their way through their tasks in real life. Users will gain experience points to earn cool new titles and battle skills as they level up.
The User Journey
With a strong direction for our app theme, we needed to develop the users' journey and ideal experience with the app.
Prototyping
Wireframes
After completing the research such as identifying the problem, creating personas, etc., the next step was to create sketches and wireframes and filter for the most promising solutions which led to our high-fidelity wireframes.
Each of us started with paper sketches that led to low-fidelity wireframes in Figma. When designing the wireframes, I kept the users in mind by keeping the pages simple, and clean, and using easy-to-follow navigation. After a team meeting, we agreed upon the style and identity of the app and created high-fidelity wireframes.
Low-fidelity wireframes
High-fidelity wireframes
Take a look.
Take a look at the prototype of Task Quest.
Test
Matt, a user tester, completeing the first task.
Usability Testing
The first round of testing our prototype was with four users. We gave each user the exact same set of instructions to determine if there were any trends in the feedback provided.
The Tasks
Sign up and reach the homepage
Create a task list
Check off a priority task and win a reward
The Results
All testers successfully completed Task #1.
All testers successfully completed Task #2.
All testers successfully completed Task #3.
Feedback
Below is the common feedback we heard from the users.
Signing up was easy to do.
The font is small and hard to read.
Loved the look and feel of the app, very engaging.
Using a camera to create a list is genius, saves time
Would like the ability to connect Google Calendar to the app or other calendar applications.
Overall app was very easy to navigate.
Conclusion
Task Quest received rave reviews and positive feedback from the tested users. The team is in discussions of implementing the app to help users complete their tasks in an exciting app.
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