Pivot

A work-life balance app that helps motivate users to manage their time and avoid burnout by rewarding them with prizes as they complete tasks.

Project Details

Company: Mayland Institute College of Art

Project dates: August 2021 - October 2021

My Role

Product Manager

The Challenge

The Problem

Before the Coronavirus pandemic, working from home was a mostly novel concept that only about 1 in 5 employed adults experienced. Today, 71% of those workers are working from home, and more than half would prefer to keep working from home even after the pandemic.

That said, In a recent study by Aczel, Kovacs, van Der Lippe and Szaszi, remote employees are split on the overall benefits to efficiency, with 30% finding working from home to be more efficient, and 30% finding it to be less so.

Finding a work/home life balance that maximizes efficiency at work and prevents burnout at home will be the ultimate test of whether the practice of working from home is here to stay.

Value Proposition

To start out, our team reflected on our own experiences as students and employees, striving for work-life balance, and identified our wants, needs and fears. Some important wants included the want to feel productive, in control, and satisfied by how we spend our time. There were also more practical needs, such as passing in school, performing well at our jobs, and maintaining physical/mental health. Meanwhile, the key fears surrounded the possibility for an app to add more mental clutter.

Defining Needs and Wants

Based on our research and user feedback, full-time remote employees find it challenging to manage a healthy work-life balance, and to avoid burnout as the line between their personal and professional environment blurs.

From here, we defined some key things a product should accomplish, which include providing structure to one’s life in a non-disruptive manner, and provide clarity that one is meeting their goals.

“How might we assist users in setting physical and digital boundaries between their personal and professional lives, while encouraging healthier habits and reducing distractions?”

Research

Surveys

In order to cast a wide net among potential users, we decided the best course of action to start the research process was to develop and send out a survey. We shared this among various social media and professional platforms, in the hopes of attracting a wide diversity of remote employees.

In total, our team received 35 survey responses, 74% who work from home full-time, and 26% who work from home part-time (1-4 days per week). The following results were gathered from the respondents.

Based on the survey freeform text responses, we organized the benefits and limitations that our users perceived of working remotely. We found that the top benefits expressed by our participants were no commuting and schedule flexibility and control. On the other hand, the top limitations were participants finding it hard to connect with their coworkers and the lack of communication when working from home.

We wrote 7 interview questions to be asked in face-to-face interviews:

How long have you been working from home?
What does a typical workday look like for you?
How do you separate your work and personal life?
How do you feel about working from home?
How do you avoid burnout?
Do you currently use any app or digital solutions to help you WFH more effectively?
If you had an ideal app or digital solution in mind, what would it be?

We were able to interview 5 participants, ages 18-55 who all work remote full-time. After synthesizing these data, we discovered a few common challenges and current solutions:

Distractions - Users found that it was more distracting to work from home than at an office. Paying attention during Zoom calls, checking phone notifications, and dealing with children were all common concerns,

Work-Life Balance - Users overwhelmingly found it harder to separate their personal lives from their professional lives while working from home. One user remarked that it would be nice to be reminded to wrap up your day on your work computer, while another user noted that it takes practice to have a good work-life balance.

Physical Separation - Many of our users found they need physical separation from their work devices or work stations in order to fully take a break. One user remarked that “I try to stick with business hours so to stop working at 6, or take a break to step away for my eyes. And do work later.”

Digital Separation - Many of our users already had preferred apps to help them focus at work, including Google Calendar and Apple Watch reminders. One user, however, avoids having work apps on their phone completely so as to not have to check work constantly when away from their desk. Users generally want the ability to silence notifications. For example, one user remarked, “I find it helpful to mute notifications on the phone or computer so I can focus on work or meetings.”

User Interviews

Defining The Problem

Problem Statement

Based on our research and user feedback, full-time remote employees find it challenging to manage a healthy work-life balance, and to avoid burnout as the line between their personal and professional environment blurs.

How might we assist users in setting physical and digital boundaries between their personal and professional lives, while encouraging healthier habits and reducing distractions?

Competitive Analysis

In order to get a sense for the landscape of competitions, we conducted a competitive analysis of similar apps on the market. This gave us an outside perspective on products that were achieving specific functions successfully and less successfully, which we could take into account when putting together our own product.

Service Blueprint

Before we started designing, we wanted to create a service blueprint to outline the path users would take when interacting with our app. Below is the artifact with the happy path represented by the dotted line. Click the image to view the expanded service blueprint

Solution

Personas

Based on all this research, we came up with 2 personas. Our first persona, Lily, is a single mom working as Project Manager at an IT company. Her days are full with meetings, household stuff & taking care of her 7 year old kid.

Working from home has its benefits and downsides for her, especially when she tries to focus on herself & her child it becomes frustrating. It feels like work never ends.

Our 2nd persona, Jesse, is a single, young Account Executive working at a startup. He moved to a new city during the pandemic and is finding it hard to make friends outside of work.

He misses social aspects of being in an office with his colleagues, but enjoys the lack of distractions at home. He sets his own meeting schedule and finds it hard to disconnect once work is over.

Ideating A Solution

User Scenarios

Having created our user personas, we were able to empathize more with the potential users of our product and aimed to establish the user scenarios in which our product would be most valuable. We heard feedback that many of our users found it difficult to separate their work lives from their personal lives, sometimes physically separating their work spaces as much as they attempted digitally separating them.

Therefore, our user scenarios showcase habits where users are distracted during the workday and unable to complete tasks, while overworking in the evenings long after their shift has finished for the day.

User Flow

We also created a very high level user flow to start thinking about how an average user would navigate the app.

Designing A Prototype

After identifying the problem and ideating on a solution, our team’s next course of action was to put together a final plan, from sketches to our prototype.

Low Fidelity Sketches

Based on the user responses and feedback we had received from the survey, as well as our competitive analysis and product comparisons, our team put together some low fidelity wireframe sketches as a basis for the rest of our prototype.

Sitemap

In addition to our sketches, we worked in parallel to put together and iterate on a sitemap that lays the foundation of our final product. In the sitemap, we included top level navigation as well as sub navigation that we anticipated would be a helpful starting point for our prototype and user tests.

We wanted to fulfill some of the challenges that were expressed by our users in the initial surveys in providing a place to manage time, calendar events, and to-do lists all in one place.

Visual Design

As a first pass at our branding styles, we focused first on color scheme and typography, aiming for softness without loss of legitimacy, and a natural and complementary color palette that could help users reduce stress but maximize productivity. In our typography choice of Lato, we went for an adaptable sans-serif, round without being distractingly so, with the flexibility of font weight.

Above all, we wanted to ensure legibility and accessibility to be inclusive of all users, which ultimately contributed to our typography and color choices.

Additionally, creating a logo was an important step to further cement our brand identity.

Mid Fidelity Designs

Before diving headfirst into our prototype with the visual design branding we had established, we first wanted to complete our prototype in mid-fidelity in order to conduct thorough user testing.

These mid-fidelity designs helped us as a team fully think through the user journey and interactions, as well as take into account the functionality that needed to be revised or removed from the product.

Testing Our Solution

User Testing Guide

Explore Application

Allow the user to explore the app and record the results.
What interests the user?
What do they seem to not care for?
What sort of logic can you determine from the user's actions?

Outcome

Ask the user how they felt about this test.
What worked?
What didn't work?
What is their overall impression?

Opportunities

What could we improve or introduce for our users?

Task Questions

1. Login & Start a Task (Call Steve Task)

You're logging into work and you see that your first task is to call your manager, Steve. Please demonstrate how you would start and complete this task.

2. Create (Add) New Task

Steve assigns you a new project to complete. Please add this as a new task.

3. Create New Calendar Event

During your meeting, Steve also mentioned that you will have to present this project in November. Go ahead and add a calendar event so you don't forget.

4. Redeem Stars

You want to take a break from working on your presentation. Explore the leaderboards and redeem some of the stars you earned for a prize!

5. Change Current Work Hours

You decide it would be more productive to shift your hours up while you are finishing this presentation. Please demonstrate how you would change your current work hours.

User Testing Results

We completed usability testing during the first round of sessions on the mid-fidelity wireframes and recorded the most important pieces of feedback below:

Positives:

Calendar and event list should be interchangable.
Profile and settings are seaprate things.
Icons and functions were easily understood.
Enjoyed design and app experience.

Areas for Improvement:

Task timing was confusing.
Missed the plus button on the homepage.
Make leaderboard an optional widget.
Changing work hours was tricky.

During our second round of testing, we completed another round of usability tests with our revised prototype. Below are the notes from these tests. Click the image below to view the full notes.

Some key takeaways from the tests were:

Users were a bit confused about where to start a task.
Users found it easy to add new tasks & calendar events.
Users had trouble finding the settings menu to change working hours
Users enjoyed the overall look and feel of the app.
The Spotify playlist was a popular feature for users.
Being able to earn stars and redeem them for prizes delighted users.

User Journey Map

Taking all our research and keeping in mind our personas, we generated a user journey map. Click the image below to view the full map.

Prototype

Having completed user testing using our mid-fidelity prototype and receiving invaluable feedback on the design and functionality of the prototype, our team was ready to apply the visual branding and iterate further on the high fidelity designs of the app.

Here, we expanded more on certain features, and acknowledge that there is plenty of room for improvement.

Next Steps

For next steps, we propose iterations on our initial prototype to expand on some key areas:

1. Expand leaderboards & prizes

There are many ways to expand leaderboards and prizes, two main ideas surfaced at the end of our project which would be perfect for future iterations:

a) Company Sponsored Rewards: Since our time was limited, we had to pick the best for MVP for the leaderboards. In future iterations, the idea would be to add prizes so that if at least 5 people at your company sign up with a company email, you unlock an admin role where you can gift prizes via the company card (this would be verified via a sole source letter or company W9 to avoid scammers).

b) In-app prizes: Adding a feature to change your icon or earn badges for various accomplishments would help the leaderboard and gamification aspect of the app shine more. We researched apps like DuoLingo and UXCEL which rely heavily on user interest in these.

2. Create more robust reports

On a small app, it is hard to design for every report users might want. We could expand to include more than just work productivity as users can sync their personal calendars. We could also expand this to include tracking time off and even rewards users for taking breaks throughout the day.

Another concept here would be to email weekly, monthly, or annual progress reports to each individual. This could become very useful if our app is eventually used by HR departments and managers to look back at all their employees have achieved during reviews.

3. Develop partnerships

Similar to expanding the leaderboards and prizes, expanding our partnerships with brands would help users become more interested in the app. While we are starting with sample partnerships with companies related to productivity (Apple, Starbucks, etc.), we can open this up in the future to other retail and SaaS companies that would be interested in partnering with us.

4. Rework the Settings and Profile pages

Some of our users were confused by the difference between the Profile section and the Settings section. They also didn’t expect changes to your working hours to be under Settings. This will need to be reworked in a future iteration to make it more apparent where users find which settings and information.