Desk Research:

Before I started, I carried out some research on the topic to help me understand the idea better. From my research, I found out that 1 in every 4 people find it difficult to stay focused with work, especially when they work from an environment where they control their time. Of these, less than half of them are sure of what to do in order to be more productive. The rest, who are aware of what to do, have little to no idea on how to do what they know to do.

The primary reason for this is because people stared at their laptop screens for long hours without breaks and thus they experienced a lot of burnout. This leads them to postpone tasks and eventually results in frenzy situations of cramming so much into an hour or a day before deadline, which negatively impacts their mental health.

By having a positive work culture, people can be more productive, not only in their work, but also in their relationships, families, and be able to cope with stress in other areas of their lives.

Competitive Analysis:

They are a variety of work productivity apps currently available. These apps focus on creating a time schedule to work with, setting the number of minutes to work on, and also blocking distracting applications and websites on the devices that they are available on.

Many of these apps follow the pomodoro technique, but offer too much flexibility in setting the time assigned to different tasks. This will not work for all users, as some users can still set a small amount of time to work on the project and set a large amount of time for their breaks.

For others, their complex app environment makes it difficult for some users to use them. In cases like this, the said user is already anxious about if they are clicking the right button, and not making a mistake; overwhelming them before they even start working.

User Interviews:

I decided to conduct user interviews as I believed that most people may not be completely honest and comfortable when filling survey forms. I chose 4 people who I knew fit the user profile and engaged them in a conversation about the apps that they used and what they felt about these apps. I recorded their answers during the interviews, and watched their reactions and expressions to different questions. This helped me to analyze and understand better their responses, and what they needed.

My goal was to understand what people thought about being productive and how they were going about fixing the challenges that they had encountered with staying productive.

User Persona:

I was able to arrive at a user persona after careful analysis of the users’ feedback that I got from the interviews.

Information Architecture:

After analysis of my persona, and competitors, I was able to understand the mental model that was previously used, and I felt the need to improve on that model and sort the functions into a user-friendly and priority-based framework. I also made sure to show at most three functions to the users on each screen to avoid them taking too long to decide on what to do.

User Flows:

From the Information Architecture, I moved on to define the user flow. Here, I thought deeply about the entry points, the exit points, and what alternate routes they would take to complete a task.

Sketches:

Final Design:

Tests And Feedback:

Usability testing was done via Google meet with the goal to know if the flow for Pommo was easy for the user to navigate and complete a task. I presented the testers with the prototype, and asked them to click through, using the prototype as if it were an application. I made sure to point out how to identify the clickable areas of the app to them before they started.

I observed that the users enjoyed the flow as “it was simple, easy to navigate, and straight to the point”. However, while some users were met with some difficulties during testing, because they did not understand what some elements meant or why some functions were used in the way that they were used.

Overall, what stood out for the users was the fact that they didn’t have too many functions or buttons in their face. And because of this, they felt calm and at ease to use the application. Another feature that stood out was the reminders that they would get for certain important tasks.

Improvements/insights:

Based on the user feedback gotten from the usability tests, I can conclude that the app met the desired goals of the users. However, there were a few challenges that the users encountered. This will be the first thing that will be revised and improved upon.

There were also some suggestions to new features that the users made. Suggestions like how the application would manage phone calls, seeing that it would put the phone devices on Do-Not-Disturb. My next steps would be to do more research in order to gather more data both from potential and new competitors, and also from other users. I would like to implement this data in a way that it doesn’t affect the simplistic and minimalist concept of the whole application as this was the major win-over for the users.