The pandemic upended my daily routine pretty abruptly. After a couple weeks of working from home, I started to crave some kind of structure to make things feel more “normal”. Past experience taught me that just trying to do the same thing every day wasn’t sustainable. When I’d inevitably miss a day or “mess up”, I’d feel like I lost all progress and had to start over. Instead, I grabbed my whiteboard and drafted a “choose your own adventure” style to-do list. My hope was that creating a more flexible structure would help me stick to my goals.
After using this method for a while, I started to wonder if others might find it useful as well. I’ve designed this mobile app as a thought experiment to explore how I might transform my whiteboard to-do list into a tool that could help others.
The idea for this app boils down to two main workflows: setting goals and viewing and recording goals. In the future I also plan to explore how someone might track their progress over time.
I’ve found that the key to staying motivated is to prioritize progress, not perfection. With this in mind, I wanted to reconsider how goals are defined. Instead of specific tasks, I started with broader areas of focus (or “buckets”) so I could define goals more generally. For me, I wanted to make sure I was tending to my mental health, physical exercise, and creative outlets.
Once I established my buckets, I detailed the specific activities tied to each one. For physical activity, I decided to run, jumprope, and bike. By considering the detailed activities within the broader areas of focus, we can approach defining our goals with more flexibility.
With this framework in mind, I needed to figure out how to actually define my goals. I decided to think of them in two dimensions: specificity (a particular task vs a general “bucket”) and frequency (whether I would do it daily vs weekly). For example, I could say that I want to do something to get physically active every day, but I only want to commit to running twice a week.
I sketched out the steps needed for defining goals. At this point, I had some ideas for the UI, but I mainly wanted to focus on capturing the activities for each step.
Deciding how to view goals and record progress was trickier than I expected it to be. Because I had both daily and weekly goals, I struggled with the simplest way to show them. Recording an activity proved even tougher since there could be overlap in someone’s daily and weekly goals.
I wanted to make it easy to see your goals and mark them as complete. Initially I explored options that would let you do both in a single view. However, each of these approaches had drawbacks, and didn’t address the potential overlap between daily and weekly goals.
After my initial exploration, I decided to treat viewing goals separately from actually marking one as complete. I opted to show daily and weekly goals in separate lists and create a dedicated action for recording progress.
Once I had the steps of the workflows sketched out, I moved on to wireframes to determine the most appropriate UI patterns.
With wireframes refined, I created mockups so that I could start thinking about aesthetic/stylistic decisions. I leveraged Material Design components to create patterns that will be familiar to users. I also built the color palette using Material Design’s Theme Builder.
Once I had the mocks fleshed out, I built a prototype to better illustrate the workflows and share with others for feedback. A psychologist I shared it with was excited for the potential to use it with her therapist clients. I would love to get this app developed and continue designing additional features so others can use it.