System Path

Our personas were based on two categories of students who had different priorities in their morning. While “Aaron the undergrad” gets distracted by their phone unintentionally by using social media apps and responding to notifications, “Grace the grad student” often requires to use her phone intentionally in order to respond to critical emails and Slack messages. However, Grace gets distracted and spends longer than the anticipated time on the phone after the critical task was completed. We incorporated these two scenarios in the system diagram and tried to understand the paths they take either to complete all morning tasks successfully or fail in completing the tasks. The diagram informed us on both how to keep them from getting distracted and how we can bring them back to focus on their tasks if they are already distracted.

Bubble Map

With the knowledge gained from the system diagram and its synthesis, we proceeded to create a Bubble Map. We believe that we need to provide both positive and negative reinforcements. The kind of reinforcement used depends on the scenario and the particular task of the app. 

Positive reinforcement is used to motivate people to stay on track with their tasks. Since the ultimate goal of the app is to make sure that the user completes their morning tasks, the task list takes the biggest area in the bubble map. Streaks is a reward system used to motivate people to complete their tasks. Since streak can be considered as an external motivator, we also provide motivational messages in order to internally motivate the users. Further in order to mitigate the lack of motivation when the external motivator is taken away, we allow people to recover their long streaks as well. Recovering the long streaks doesn’t require building the complete streak all over again.

Negative reinforcement is used to demotivate people from using their phones. From our studies, we noticed that notification is a big reason behind distractions for most of our participants. Therefore, we allow people to block the notifications using our notification management. Furthermore, we only allow people to open whitelisted apps (whitelisted by users) without any barriers/frictions. All of these functionalities are disabled after the user is done with their morning.

Wireflows

Task List

The initial screen of the “Task List” flow consists of a list of completed and pending tasks. We considered the results from our studies and findings from our conversations with the participants when designing the task list and every subsequent flow.

We found that users often have a preplan an entire morning ahead of time. Thus we also provide a button to create a new task on the fly.  We also noticed that some users are often confused about how a mindful, productive morning should be designed. Thus we offer them to use an existing template and edit the template. Users can also go back to check the tasks and records of completions on the prior days from a task calendar. Experience from the prior days often helps the users design their future morning tasks better.

Notification Manager

The notification manager allows users to block or unblock app notifications. As mentioned above, notification is a big reason behind distraction. Using the notification manager, users can block certain apps from which they won’t receive notifications in the morning. The notification manager will keep the notifications from the blocked apps hidden from the user. The user can see the hidden notifications in our apps. Ideally, we want users to take care of these hidden notifications once they are done with their morning. The manager will send a push notification when it detects a notification from one of the allowed apps. We designed this flow in order to ensure that users don’t get flooded with unnecessary notifications while allowing them to keep the critical notifications alive.

Streaks / History

The streaks feature has two main components – pop-up messages and a streaks history screen, both of which are meant to encourage the user to continue to improve their focus during their morning routine.

When the user completes a morning task (by checking off the last item in their morning routine checklist), a pop-up with their morning and streak summary is displayed. They can simply close the pop-up, or choose to visit the streaks history screen. On the streaks history screen, the user can see their current streak, how many days they have successfully completed their morning routine in the current week, and what they accomplished on their past mornings.

When the user misses one or more planned routine tasks on a morning (when the morning ends and at least one item remains unchecked), a pop-up with their streak loss and an encouraging/ motivational message is displayed. Here, they are offered the opportunity to count the next morning as two towards the new streak if they add their missed tasks to the next morning and complete the routine tomorrow. They can skip the offer and exit, or take the offer. A confirmation pop-up is displayed and they can tap on buttons to go to their streaks history screen or the to-do screen.

We decided to include these two components for the streaks feature because it’s important for the user to both be able to see their morning routine history and feel encouraged to get back onto a streak when they miss a morning. 

App Whitelisting

The purpose of App Whitelisting is to prevent unintentional distractions. Our studies showed that oftentimes the users pick up their phone without even consciously making the decision to use any app. Thus a lot of distractions are caused by unintentional app usage. One way to prevent such unintentional usage is to make the user wait a certain period of time when they try to access an app. This will allow users to think consciously during that wait time as to whether they want to use the app or not. If this was an unintentional distraction, we expect that the user will put the phone away because of the friction/barrier to accessing the desired app. However, there are some apps that the users would like to use intentionally. We allow the user to whitelist those apps and there will not any friction when accessing the whitelisted apps. By default, none of the apps are whitelisted. Note the second screen on the flow is not connected to the first screen. The second screen is a separate pop-up timer that shows up only when the user tries to access a non-whitelisted app on their phone.

Cohesive flow (full app)

The flow of each of the four functionalities described above is separate from each other. We believe that all of these functionalities are required to provide the best user experience and service. Our full app is each simply a combination of the four functionalities where each functionality can be accessed from a navbar. That is, there will be four menu items (icons) on the navigation bar of our app that will direct users to these four functionalities. The home screen of the app will be the first screen of the “Task List” flow. This is because the emphasis of the app is on allowing the user to create and complete tasks.