Ironhack Bootcamp UX/UI Design — Tracking App

Nowadays, it seems almost like a must for us to be productive, focused, and trying to win every single day. Always on time, organized, and more efficient than ever before. That is not always as easy as it seems. But, is there a secret, how successful people organize their daily work life? I can’t really answer this question, but I can try to explain what Alexandra Alva and I have found out about this in our UX/UI Team Project.

Project Brief

Design a new mobile app that can keep track of data and is associated with wellness or finance. Data visualization was another deliverable for this project. We decided to blend the topic a bit and do something productivity-related because we saw a good opportunity here to implement habit building and time management.

The Idea

Nico, a good friend of mine is working as a franchise manager for a restaurant chain and he is responsible for more than 60 outlets in Germany. I would describe him as a young and focused professional, who exactly knows what he wants and how to achieve his goals.

Every time we met, he had something like a notebook or journal with him. I asked him to explain to me a little more about it. He said it’s a so-called High-Performance Planner. Simple daily calendar pages, but with quotes about mindset and a journaling part. This tool helps him to get the right mindset every day and this is something really important for him.

Research

We started with a survey to get an idea about what kind of information users would like to track in a productivity app. How often they want to set their goals and if they really need another calendar. How they would like to get motivated and functional-related questions about notifications for example.

Based on that findings we have conducted interviews. We talked with students in our bootcamp, but we also interviewed a life coach and my friend, the franchise manager, who showed me the high-performance planner. While analyzing all the findings and doing the Affinity Diagram, Alex and I found some things that really stuck out in the survey and during the interviews.

Mindset seemed to be the most important thing for everybody we talked to in our interviews. We did include the word focus in our survey and were aware at some point that focus is something that interpretation could vary from person to person. Knowing why you are doing a specific task was also a highly important factor as well as goal setting.

Combining job stories with user persona helps me to empathize more with the user and find solutions that potentially fit them. Reaching the next level, being overwhelmed, and staying competitive are issues that our user persona has to deal with every day. Being aware of the right mindset and what is really important and what not, managing physical and mental health to perform as well as possible are probably things that matter to many of us.

Take a look at our pen & paper lo-fi prototypes here, where we tried to figure out the idea, both visually and from a logical perspective. Sketching different elements and parts of the mobile application, always with the overall functionality and usability in mind.

Testing our mid-fi prototype with classmates from Ironhack and remotely with maze, showed us where to make adjustments in our design. The settings icon should move from the top right corner into the profile section as well as the notification icon top left. A dashboard for the statistical overview is also added after iteration as you can see here below.

Next Steps & Key Learnings

This is only an MVP version of the productivity app. Therefore it would be good to do more user testing and research to dive deeper into the topic and get a better understanding, how the user interacts and works with the app.

The UI of the mobile app needs some fine adjustments to take it to the next level. Iconography could get more detailed and the calendar needs to be polished to make it look slick and clean.

Having the right mindset, prioritizing tasks, and being self-reflective, are all things that helped me to stay focused and perform most efficiently during this project.

Thank you for reading this article. Any feedback on this is more than welcome. Feel free to reach out, if you have any questions about this project.