HappyTask app was created to help students achieve their academic and personal goals by preventing procrastination and enhancing their self-confidence and positive feelings.
After finishing my studies, I struggled to finish my daily tasks. In order to succeed, I knew I would need to achieve my goals, but I still procrastinated. That's when I started exploring procrastination, and I was amazed at what I found.
When I started this project, my goal was to design an app that prevents procrastination in general. However, I found myself struggling to create an app that suits every procrastinator.
Procrastination has many reasons and many solutions, I wanted to pick a target audience to focus on my project and achieve the most accurate results I can.
The number of "To Do" apps is still growing, but students still procrastinate. Students often avoid tasks because they translate into threats.
And when they get threatened by tasks, procrastination is the easiest way to avoid the uncomfortable emotions that come with them.
In order to gain a better understanding of the psychology behind procrastination, and how students can prevent it, I read and summarized 5 different research studies about it.
Since I understood that there are many different reasons for procrastinating tasks and therefor many solutions, my first challenge was to find the most common problems among students.
I found out that most of the chronic procrastinators are in a loop that is called the procrastination cycle:
When students use the HappyTask app, they can win their daily tasks. They can also create a committed task when they can do the same task together, win badges and maintain their streak of finished days.
I found that although my competitors aim to finish a task on time, I couldn’t find any features that motivate their users from procrastinating a task by enhancing their positive feelings.
Identifying my competitors' strengths and weaknesses helped me differentiate my product from theirs. I wanted to see what their users liked/hated and what I could take inspiration from.
In order to gain a better understanding of how often the target users feel and act when they procrastinate, I conducted semi-structured interviews with them. Here are some of the key answers:
The majority of students are more focused on something they feel better doing rather than doing their task. I discovered that it's very easy to postpone a task for the sake of feeling better now and managing the task later.
My design requirements were reframed into key actionable statements that were broad enough to allow multiple solutions, but narrow enough to focus on a few.
By brainstorming and coming up with the most effective solutions, I created a list of features that could help my users achieve their goals.
In order to help my users understand the design, I built an high-fidelity screens. This clarity aids in better decision-making and alignment with the project objectives.
Testing my product with users to get feedback and identify areas of improvement. Take the feedback into account and change the product accordingly.
Students can manage their daily tasks, adding new daily and see their progress. Making the tasks more friendly by using - subtasks, priorities and time per task.
By creating a project page, students can collaborate and divide tasks. When other students see you assign to a task it is more likely for them to get motivated and finish their tasks either.
It is possible for students to earn badges by completing different challenges they are given.
The more frequently a student is reminded of his or her progress, the easier it becomes to motivate them to complete work and overcome procrastination.
Although in my research I found many different kinds of procrastinators it was crucial to make user interviews and find common problems and goals.
My goal here was to enhancing the positive feelings of the students by increasing their motivation and confidence. If I had more time I would try to create a better experience of doing tasks together but my main goal was accomplished.