Fostering productivity in a remote world
BACKGROUND
Climp has come forward in times of COVID to understand and help people who face difficulty in managing the work from home scenario and juggling this newfound blur between personal and professional space. It is not a usual to-do list or messaging mobile app but almost like a friend who takes off the load to teaches one to organize and be more productive.
DURATION
5 weeks (Aug ‘20 - Sep’20)
MY ROLE
User research, ideation, conversation design, wireframing, visual design, prototyping
COLLABORATORS
Anvita Mathur (Mentor)
Outcome
Users responded positively to the app, with many finding the chatbot feature particularly intriguing. They mentioned that receiving additional rewards for accomplishing tasks would provide them with a sense of gratification and motivate them to strive for more.
What can be improved?
Due to time constraints, I only considered the essential use cases for conversation design, if I had more time I’d have designed more user scenarios and conversations.
By learning from the user's schedule and preferences, the chatbot can provide a more personalized experience.
As the target market is active on social media, users can engage in healthy competition with their friends on the Climp platform, which could boost productivity.
Learnings & Takeaways
I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project as I learnt to deliver quite a lot in a short span of time. Some of the learnings that will always be close to my heart are:
Gamification goes a long way
1. Rewarding users for the time invested in any task, would keep them hooked by driving them to achieve more.
2. Once the habit is formed, it will become their muscle memory to log tasks and use this app as a source of motivation.
Conversational design is infinite
1. If I had more time in hand, I would have built out more conversations, and possible use cases from beginning to end and test that with some users.
2. It’s very crucial to design for fallback scenarios to guide the user back into the conversation.
Voice interaction is engaging
In a difficult time when people miss social interaction, engaging in a voice interaction with a chatbot which is determined to help and guide throughout the journey as a friend, becomes instrumental.
Visual language of Climp
I had defined the visual style from scratch as Climp didn’t have a color palette of its own. I also added typography details and sourced the necessary icons and illustrations.
COLOR PALETTE
TYPOGRAPHY
ICONS
Final Design
“Hi Aurora, onboard the users”
Introducing Aurora as a personal productivity coach, can provide tips and advice that motivate users to improve their productivity levels and achieve their goals, creating an engaging onboarding experience that establishes her credibility and expertise.
Quick creation of a task
When designing the "add a new task" flow, defining specific parameters beforehand can simplify and expedite the process.
Start a Pomodoro
There's no more effective method for boosting productivity than adopting the Pomodoro technique! With just the click of a button, users can use the timer to track their tasks and focus more efficiently.
Onboarding users about the benefits of this technique can spark interest before they try for the first time.
Measuring productivity
Task progress tracking boosts planning and proactive goal achievement. The system I designed, awards Karma points for task completion, motivating users through gamification and unlocking productivity levels.
Informing on Aurora’s capabilities
Informing users about what to expect out of a chatbot is super useful for a frictionless experience as it reduces fallback scenarios to a great extent.
Easy organizing
Climp uses color-coded separation for work and personal tasks with weekly/daily views to aid planning. To jumpstart users' organization, I synced their Google Calendar events as a first step.
Immersive Experience of Voice Interaction
The productivity market today
As I was in the ideation phase of finding a solution, it was necessary to gather some information about other productivity apps in the market and see how they're contributing to the landscape and if there were any gaps and opportunities.
This list helped me identify which features are already familiar to users and which ones need to be designed specifically for them. This also served as a roadmap to give me a clear sense of direction when it comes to prioritizing Climp's features.:
As a result, I had a 1-hour brainstorming session with my mentor to discuss multiple feature ideas and then mapped them in a 2x2 matrix to downselect.
You can view full size version here
At the end of this, we settled on Aurora. A personal assistant who guides the user on becoming organized and also suggests how to improve productivity. She is also capable of doing basic jobs like adding, editing and deleting tasks.
MEET AURORA
An AI-powered chatbot which provides the users with the motivation and guidance they need to reach their productivity goals, with just a simple voice command of "Hi Aurora"
Defining Aurora
In the interest of time given for the project, I quickly iterated on defining the personality traits - Authoritative, Reassuring, Calm and Knowledgeable.
By conversational modelling I identified the user’s intentions and mapped a range of possible utterances to responses from the system.
Based on the insights I gathered from prioritization matrix, I defined Aurora’s capabilities. I also designed for fallback scenarios, so that the user shouldn’t get lost in the conversation and chatbot should be able to guide the user back:
You can view full size version here
Sketching the flow of the app
I started sketching some ideas on paper knowing that I had to design for two types of user groups, by keeping in mind their technology quotients. It took me multiple iterations to come up with a flow which is intuitive, easy to navigate and more importantly, quick, because Climp’s users struggled to find time in their day-to-day lives:
Some early ideas..
AURORA'S GOAL
Engaging users to build a habit of planning and getting productive by giving them tips and keeping them motivated.
In terms of personality traits of the users, there were some differences which led me to define two types of user personas:
Synthesizing Insights
To synthesize the data gathered from these interviews, I chose to do affinity mapping by grouping similar observations into themes:
MAJOR PAIN POINTS
No boundaries between personal and professional life
Low productivity leading to de-motivation
Less focus while working from home
Missing social interaction and
collaboration
I identified potential challenges for our spectrum of users. Reframing the challenges turned them into opportunities for design.
How might we motivate people to get organized and productive, in a remote work environment, so that they can achieve a work-life balance?
Problem Space
As a consequence of COVID pandemic, many people have had to work remotely from their home, and that has become the “new normal” due to which people are facing challenges in setting clear boundaries between their personal and professional lives. The practice of wearing casual clothing, such as pajamas, during Zoom meetings has contributed to a more relaxed work culture, leading to work spilling over into personal time and a subsequent decrease in motivation and productivity.
Who’s going to use the platform?
Millennials
Age 23-40 yrs
+
Working
from home
=
Target market
Empathizing with users
As a first step, I wanted to gather some first hand reflections about the problem, therefore, I conducted remote interviews with 9 users to hear about their work from home stories. As a matter of fact, the feedback verified that the productivity pain point is common among all of them.
Some of the questions asked in the interview:
What kind of tasks do you usually struggle with and how does that make you feel?
What is your current workflow like and what do you find challenging about it?
Have you ever made a to-do list for your tasks?
Do you prefer working in short bursts or longer periods of time?
What are some common distractions that prevent you from being productive and how do you handle them?
How do you measure and track your progress towards your goals?
Tell me a scenario where you multi-tasked work with a personal task. How did it go?
Some user quotes
"More distraction while working from home"
"I’m lazy at being
organised. It’s
overwhelming"
"Not a balanced work-life
as it was before"
"That satisfaction
you get when you
strike off a task from
the list"
"No bandwidth for
personal interests"
"I wish the day was
longer than 24 hours"
"It’s important to have a switch on/ off button from work"
"Difficult to stay focused while multi-tasking"
Working with Arushi, the first thing you will notice is her zeal for skill and knowledge gathering. Arushi would want to dig deeper into topic and challenges thrown at her by asking questions. She would truly be an asset in an environment that required deeper research and insights of the product.
-Anvita Mathur, Senior UX Designer at Lollypop Design
Whether you're a potential co-worker, a fellow creative, or simply a curious soul, I'd love to hear from you!
Drop me a Hi and let's get the conversation started.
arushi.aa13@gmail.com
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