Getting rid of boring to-do lists
To-do lists and everyday tasks can be extremely boring and hard to get through, but they don't have to be. Gamification can help make us more productive throughout the day.
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About the Project
As someone who's life revolves around making to-do lists. I often find it hard to stay focused on completing some of the more mundane items on my list. I took it as a fun project idea to design an app that implemented gamification elements to a to-do list in order increase productivity.
Steps Completed
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Gamification research
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Establishing design principles
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Wireframes
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Designing user flows
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High fidelity mockups
User Research
While thinking about different possibilities on how to improve the to-do list model I first needed to understand what causes people to not complete everything on their list. I began with interviewing 8 friends who I knew use lists to stay productive to discover what pain points they have and alternative solutions they've tried. Asking simple questions such as "What causes you to not complete your list?" allowed me to discover some needs, behaviors, and goals. From that I was able to synthesize them into user types below.
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The Busy Bee
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Young people often have very busy schedules between balancing work, hobbies, and their social life. Often times they have every intention of completing their to-do list, but end up running out of hours in the day to do so.
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Job Story: When a user chooses to download a productivity app, they are expecting the technology to provide greater benefits from the app compared to writing it down on paper. An app must have a way of keeping the user on track through the ability to prioritize certain tasks over others.
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The Procrastinator
This user struggles with staying focused with the task at hand leading to them spending to much time on each task which ultimately leads to the inability to finish everything on their list.
Job Story: For users that struggle to complete tasks due to procrastination the app will need to incentive them through gamification to stay focused on completing each task.
Problem/Goal
As someone who's life revolves around making to-do lists. I often find it hard to stay focused on completing some of the more mundane items on my list. I took it as a fun project idea to design an app that implemented gamification elements to a to-do list in order increase productivity.
User Research
Gamification Exploration
Wireframes
High Fidelity
Mockups
Gamification Best Practices and Patterns
As part of my research, there are different types of game mechanics that could be implemented into the app in order to promote user engagement. These were challenge, points, badges, leaderboards, journey, and constraints.
I choose to implement the points game mechanic into the app, as it allowed users to place numerical values in relation to importance on tasks, as well as the ability for users to directly see how many possible points they could have scored for any given day.
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For the game mechanic I implemented, I took inspiration from IOS soccer free kick games which have users flick a ball into the goal to score points. I thought this mechanic was worth testing out as I had always found the games extremely addicting and fun. Along with that I believed that there were similarities in flicking a ball to crossing an item off of a to-do list with pen and paper.
In order for the app to differentiate itself from the thousands of other habit tracker and to-do lists apps on the app store, the client wanted to utilize gamification and keep users on the app through it.
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The first hurdle was to discover what kind of game mechanics should be added that are fun but also fits cohesively with a to-do list app.
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To start I began by looking at the current competitor apps and understanding what gamification elements they implemented. The two main competitors I looked at were Streak and Productive.
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Streak implemented a system of holding a finger down on a task to fill up the bar. This symbolizes consecutive days in a row that a user has completed the same task. Productive does not utilize gamification to the same degree as it has a one touch solution to mark tasks as completed.
Design Princples
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Utilize data visualization whenever
possible
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Dark Interface with vibrant secondary color to establish hierarchy
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Implement fun and addictive game mechanics that are easily accessible and intuitive.
Wireframes
After establishing the desired design principles and the game mechanic to implement, I began working on wireframes for the app. This allowed em to find the best way to utilize the scoring game mechanic as well as establish a filing system for completed and incomplete tasks. Along with that I built out a task scheduling system as well as a calendar for users to track which days they completed certain tasks throughout the month and week. I added these additional features as I believe it is important for users to see how well they've done as well as where they can improve. The progress bars act as a weekly report card for users who are trying to improve their productivity.
High Fidelity Mockups
For the high fidelity mockups of the app, it was important that data visualization was prominently displayed throughout the app whenever possible. This was important for solving the problem of lack of focus on each task for "The Procrastinator" and the busy schedule of the "Busy Bee". Choosing the purple to standout with the dark interface both users are able to quickly see how productive they've been along with how many more tasks they still need to complete.
Gamification
As mentioned earlier, it was imperative that I develop a gamification mechanic that would make completing tasks fun. I implemented a version of the mobile soccer kicking mechanic. Users could flick the point value of a completed task into their daily score, similar to flicking the soccer ball into the goal. This solved the pain points for both user types. The gamification helps both users stay committed to the tasks on their lists by encouraging users to constantly comeback to the app to score their points.