TIME+ Product Design
An AI assistant to help you organize to-dos, block distracting apps, and have better time management
Ideation
Based on the research, I started to brainstorm ways to solve the productivity problems of the target users, and came up with a solution to add to-dos, block distracting apps, and check productivity summary in one place.
Adding to-do/ task
Our target users need an easy efficient way to label the task. I collected several ways that to-do/reminder apps to add new event, a pattern is to type the name, to set time and reminder with the scrolled time picker. However, picking a timer from the scroll is not easier than typing it out. Therefore, I started to think how can we make typing out task information more efficient? I came across this concept by Jakub Antalík on Dribbble.
Using AI technology, users can describe the to-do/ task in a sentence and then the app can automatically recognizes information such as time, venue. This reduces the friction to switch tabs, after typing in task title, and tap again to pick time from the scroller, then tap again to set reminder from the scroller, which is very troublesome. With this AI assistence, users can adding all information at one time seamlessly.
Reminders & Repetitions
When I dig deeper in the idea, I found out there are three categories of to-dos/ tasks that need different levels of repetitions and reminders. There are one-time tasks that doesn't have a specific deadline (no need reminder) such as grocery shopping or visit MOMA. There are one-time tasks that has a specific time or deadline such as exam. Also, there are tasks that are repetitive such as weekly assignment due every Wednesday 6pm. Therefore, it will be helpful we give different options of reminders and repetitions for to-dos.
Block distracting apps
During the user research, I found out our target users often need to use their phones during working sessions, and they are mainly distracted by entertaining apps and social medias. Therefore, it will be helpful if we can block these distractive apps during working intervals. Also, users should be able to customize what apps are distractive for the current task. For example, if I am designing something, I need Dribbble to look for inspirations. When I am doing a reading assignment, browsing Dribbble can be a waste of time and I would like to block Dribbble in this context.
Measuring productivity
Productivity is a very subjective and abstract thing. It is challenging how we can use the data to model productivity. Total working time, focused time, number of tasks worked on, number of tasks done, number of tasks done in each category all matter. Therefore, it will be helpful to take into consideration all these metrics and calculate an overall score, and then users can compare this score horizontally with a different time such as yesterday's score.