Toki is a mobile app aimed to promote work-life balance. Toki was inspired by its name which means “time of opportunity” in Japanese. Due to the pandemic, most people have been working and studying remotely, facing new challenges at home while looking for time to themselves. Toki is here to give people the opportunity to improve their livelihood by making the most of their time.
Because the productivity and wellness realms are quite broad offering a generous amount of features, the hurdle was defining the specific problems to solve for in order to avoid scope creep. Furthermore, each interviewed individual had specific goals and habits with these apps. Taking this into consideration, the core features needed to address the most common pain points.
• Implement a scheduling and reminder system
• Recommend daily mindfulness reminders to meditate
• Create a mindful product that puts users at ease upon use
To understand what needs to be built, the problem space needs to be explored further through market research and empathizing with our target demographic. The scope will include desk research on remote work and learning, the productivity and wellness mobile app industries, an analysis on Toki’s competitors and taking a deep dive into the users of these apps.
Market Research was carried out to gain insights of the target markets of productivity + wellness mobile apps and to uncover trends and opportunities within the market.
A Competitive analysis was conducted to unmask the strengths and weaknesses of the main players in the productivity and wellness mobile app industries as well as study their commonalities.
Around the same time, a survey was sent out for a week to gather information about the user demographic of productivity and wellness mobile apps such as identifying their needs and preferences. A total of 13 responses were collected and showed that majority of users were women between the ages 21 and 39 who were worked from home as an employee or student. You can check out the survey summary here.
Fortunately, majority of the survey participants were more than happy to share their experiences on productivity and wellness apps:
All participants felt that certain apps have a great impact on their life and were very vocal about their concerns:
You can find the full Research Debrief here.
It was now time to condense our research data with empathy to understand the end-user’s common goals, needs and behaviors.
Meet Melissa! She is the amalgam of the user interview participants. Melissa will be our compass to navigate through the design process so our decisions along the way are aligned with the end-user’s goals and tackles the problems that need to be solved.
In conjunction to creating my persona, an empathy map was made based on the collected data and observations of user behavior and used it as a way generate insights towards identifying and understanding their needs and problems.
Although understanding Melissa’s goals and needs is important, turning them into actionable problems statements is a crucial step to creating the right solutions for her needs:
In this case, I used the “How Might We” approach to create the focus of the problem that needed to be solved. During this stage, a huge list of features were gathered from competitor apps (distinguished in different colors) with the high impact from our research and grouped them based on functionality:
.svg)
Thanks to our problem statement, I was able to narrow down the main features.
Due to time constraints and feasibility, the Must-Have Features were determined by their ability to provide the highest value with the least effort:
At this stage, the entry and exit points need to be made clear as well as thinking of the possibile routes of how Melissa will achieve her goal. Taking her behaviors and actions into consideration, I have created user flows - one for productivity and another for wellness, of course.
In the earlier stage during the collection of features from high-impact competitor apps, I’ve come across a couple of design patterns that inspired my low fidelity wireframe sketches.
For the Home screen (left), I wanted to create a space where users can access the main features of the app, give them the ability to schedule a reminder and be mindful of creating a cluttered UI.
The next screen (right) shows what happens when a user presses the “+” button found on the bottom right of the screen, allowing them to schedule a reminder.
The task creation screen (left) shows the basic functions of scheduling a reminder by entering a title and selecting a specific date and time.
Although it isn’t part of the Must-Have Features, the Notes screen (right) was roughly sketched because I was inspired at the time and wanted to keep it for a future iteration.
The task creation screen (left) shows the basic functions of scheduling a reminder by entering a title and selecting a specific date and time.
Although it isn’t part of the Must-Have Features, the Notes screen (right) was roughly sketched because I was inspired at the time and wanted to keep it for a future iteration.
For the Meditation screen (left), the goal here was to layout the audio blocks in a way for users to smoothly get a quick moment to clear their minds and manage their anxieties.
The next screen (right) displays what it may look like when an audio block is selected.
Similar to the approach to my sketches, I have put together some inspirations aimed at creating the vibe that the Toki app experience is simple, thoughtful and inspiring.
Staying true to the brand attributes, I’ve chose the brand colors to mainly be blue and yellow. Not only is blue is a great color for both female and male users, it promotes the feeling of peace, stability and trust. Yellow compliments well with blue and expresses emotions of happiness, friendliness, and enlightenment.
As for the Logo, I wanted to symbolize Toki’s very meaning “Time of Opportunity” by experimenting different moon phases and anything that represented the concept of time.
There was a good contrast between the dark blue and yellow so it made it to the final version of the logo which was simple, memorable, and can scale well.
Since this is a brand new product, prototyping sooner will reveal any assumptions and creates the chance to fail fast and fail forward without over-investing time and effort on the first iteration.
Check out the prototype here.
In order to determine whether the mobile app works as intended, it was time to put it in front of our intended user demographic and test to understand what works well or what can be improved. The test was conducted with 6 participants over a recorded Zoom call where they were given scenarios to complete specific tasks.
Task 1: Schedule a reminder
Task 2: Start meditating to a specific audio
Once the usability test was over, I created an affinity map to organize related information and observations into distinct clusters. In doing so, the data is easier to synthesize and leads to meaningful insights.
There are still things that can be tested and improved on, including but not limited to:
Doing this project was quite challenging because creating a dual purpose app based on two very different yet broad industries can easily become overwhelming and time consuming.
What I enjoyed 😁
Surprisingly, I enjoyed doing the High-Fidelity Prototype revisions after the usability test. Although it was time consuming, it was a great learning experience to always design for accessibility no matter how tight the deadline is.
My favorite moments 😊
Creating the logo! It was interesting trying to brand for an app that combines two disciplines - productivity & wellness - but it was quite enjoyable!
My least favorite moment 😭
Honestly, I was overwhelmed with the long list of features I had to narrow down and struggled figure out which MUST HAVEs were feasible on the first iteration. Now that I’ve got some experience, maybe it won’t be as bad next time.
Room for Improvement 🤔
One thing I didn’t account for was recruiting enough participants AND anticipate that there may be a few no-shows if they are no longer available. I’ve had participates who promised they would be available ahead of time only to find myself scrounging for last minute participants who still fit my target demographic.
