Case study: Perforest — native android app for perfectionists.

UX research, UI design, high fidelity prototype and users testing.

We worked on this project as a team for two weeks. We focused on the UX research for one week and on the UI development for another week.

— THE CLIENT

The National Wellness Institute is an organization founded in 1977 with the mission of providing health promotion and wellness professionals unparalleled resources and services that fuel professional and personal growth.

Our mission is to develop a native Android app to help perfectionist people manage their time and stress level.

— FEATURE ANALYSIS

First we did a little feature analysis. Todoist and Rescue time are more focused on the time management. Plantie and Forest include also a gamification in their features.

— QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

To begin our user research, we built a survey on google form to get insights from our users. 89 users answered our survey. This is what we learned from them:

70,3 % of the users feel stressed in general in their daily life.

45,2 % of the users use an application to help them organize their time.

88,9% of the users use paper to-do lists and 61,1% are using their smartphone calendar.

68,7% of the users feel peaceful thanks to the flora flowers and trees.

— QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: USER INTERVIEWS

Then we interviewed stressed people but we realized that people are not stressed by the same things. So we focused on the perfectionist ones.

We managed to conduct 5 users interviews. We found out our users work a lot and are very perfectionists. They spend too much time on projects, and waste their time unnecessarily. They like using to-do list to organize their time, it helps them anticipate and plannifer their life.

“To keep calm, I use timer applications, it works !!” Kathryn 29 y.o

“It’s really difficult for me to prioritize because I wan everything done at the same time, but I know it’s impossible” Claire, 27 y.o

“I can waste my time unnecessarily on my projects because I can’t stop changing details ” Laura, 30 y.o

“I like using to-do list apps, you can put a title on your list, it’s easy, straight forward !” Alexandra, 32 y.o

“Anticipating and planning helps me to get organised” Chloe, 30 y.o

— THROUGH THE PERFECTIONIST MIND: THE EMPATHY MAP

We could get more insights thanks to the empathy map tool, to understand more our perfectionist users. We discovered that their biggest pain is that they struggle to stop working and thinking about their tasks to do. So they feel stressed and tired. They also like to be organized at work and in their daily life. They feel better when they achieve a task. They wish they could stop worrying about their work.

— USER PRIMARY PERSONA

We created our user primary persona, Laure. She works in the events department for a large hotel; she works a lot, is a perfectionist, smart, she is also making to do list, and using calendars to feel in control all the time.

She would like to have a better work life balance and know when her day is over so she can stop worrying about tasks and get relaxed.

About her pain points: She feels stressed about tasks at work, and she’s afraid of not accomplishing them all. She would not stop working unless someone else makes her realize her work is good enough.

— USER JOURNEY MAP: Perfectionist from 07:00 ☀️ to 01:00 🌙

Let’s jump in Laure’s journey. She starts her day by doing a paper to do list, she’s happy, then she arrives at work and there is an unexpected mandatory meeting, she’s angry it breaks her all day organisation.

Then as a productive person she manages to continue to work and feels better.

She realizes that it’s already 3 PM and she didn’t begin the most important task of the day so she starts to feel stressed and she needs to go faster.

She also has a medical appointment tonight, she has to hurry but doesn’t feel to go.

At night she continues to work on her project, actually it looks already great but she wants to make it perfect so she spends the whole night on it ! She’s very tired and need to sleep.

— PROBLEM STATEMENT

The journey map helped us to visualize Laure’s need and we found out a problem statement which is Perfectionist people need to find a way to prioritize and organize their daily tasks in an efficient way, in order to avoid stress because they can’t achieve everything perfectly and spend a lot of time on a single task.

How Might We help them to prioritize their daily tasks ?

How Might We help them to put a time limit so they don’t spend a lot of time on their tasks ?

How Might We help perfectionist users to be organised in their daily tasks ?

— HYPOTHESIS STATEMENT

We believe that building an application that enables them to be mindful about the priority of their tasks and the time they should spend on them will solve their stress issues.
We will know we are right if perfectionist people manage to go to bed early.

— JOBS TO BE DONE

We took the gains and pains of the users. To fit with the gains of the users we imagined a way to set a maximum number of work hours / day, prriotirtize their tasks. The job to be done of the Per-forest app is to make our users feel relaxed and accomplished at the end of the day, to set limits to their working time.

By managing their time better, lower their stress level.

— MOSCOW METHOD — MVP

We used the Moscow method to build our MVP.

We have as a must have: Set a maximum number of work hours per day. A way to prioritize the user’s tasks. And a time boxing to set guardails to effort.

— USER FLOW

This is our user flow , it looks very complex. However, this tool helped us to make sure we didn’t forget anything but you don’t go through it in detail, it will make more sense in the high-fidelity prototype.

— CONCEPT SKETCHES — LOW FIDELITY WIREFRAMES

We started sketching, we draw some ideas about the illustrations of nature we want to implement to the app. Landscapes from morning to the night, to follow the user journey.

Of course we did low fidelity wireframes in order to be sure that we solve the mains pains of our users, and that we went through the correct iterations. Then after this first step, we quickly went to the medium fidelity prototype.

— LET’S PLANT 🌳 OUR MEDIUM FIDELITY PROTOTYPE

On the Medium fidelity prototype, basically the user arrives on the home page, today’s page, here there is an empty state page, because you don’t have any tasks yet, so the app shows you a call to action button: you can click on the + to add a task.

Our primary user persona, Laure is going to add a task, she wants to see the hours which are scheduled, and the number of hours worked, in order not to spend too much time on it and not to over-schedule as she is a perfectionist.

When she clicks on the tasks, she arrives on the task detail page, where she can start the timer to make sure she time boxes the task she is going to work on.

And when she marks the tasks as complete, she plants a tree in the forest.

We added gamification to the app in order to make sure the users feel relaxed, so the users don’t stress more. Indeed, the data from the survey showed us that 68,7% of the users feel peaceful thanks to the flora flowers and trees.

And we also wanted to add a way for the users to understand that the time is flowing, so we added the natural circle of a journey. The app starts with a morning theme and goes through a day theme and ends with a night theme.

— USABILITY TESTINGS

We tested our medium fidelity prototype with 5 perfectionist users. Here are the feedbacks they gave us:

— VISUAL COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

In order to make sure that we match the concept in terme of visuals we compared different applications of stress and time management. Two of them were gamified: Forest and Plantie. The two others: Rescue Time and Todoist are just productivity tools without gamification part.

— BRAND ATTRIBUTES

We wanted our brand attributes to feel organize and productive because this is the main content of the app but we also wanted it to be peaceful relaxing and playful as our perfectionists are already stressed enough and they want an app that help them feel more relaxed.

— MOODBOARD

Based on those brand attributes we created a moodboard that we could test through a desirability testing.

70% of the users said it’s “peaceful”

40% said it’s “busy atmosphere but calm” and “fluid”

80% said that it’s “relaxing”

— ONE, TWO, TREE🌳: ILLUSTRATIONS !

We wanted to add illustrations so we practiced a lot from the shapes of the trees and the day circle landscapes. We took inspirations from natural landscapes photos of ours and on internet.

For the morning we have a colorful sunrise, they day is a shinny day with a beautiful green grass. And the night theme is more anxious with darker and warning colors such as the red burgundy and the navy blu because we want to make our users understand that it’s late and they have to stop working very soon.

— LOGO RESEARCH

To go further in the illustrations, we did a research for the logo shape. We hesitated a lot of the name of the application. We had Time-it, Task-it, but we finally decided to go for Perforest. It’s a mix of perfectionist and forest as we the user is creating a forest with the tasks he works on.

— STYLE GUIDES

Once we did all of those researches we built the style guides. We created some components in figma to keep a consistency in our prototype.

We have one style with the morning, one for the day, and the night with each trees that fit the moment of the day. Their colour change according to the height of the sun. And in the evening it is the light of the moon that illuminates them.

We selected a a curved typography because it softens the atmosphere, we didn't want a typography with sharp elements that seem more aggressive to our perfectionists.

Also, we created elements with light pastel backgrounds to remind the landscapes and to continue to transporte the users in the peaceful atmosphere without big break outs of colors.

The colour changes remain gradual because we want a fluidity also in the themes such as in real life with the weather.

— 50 SHADES OF ITERATIONS

We iterated a lot to find the right background colors. We tried different gradients of colors, and also struggled a lot on the cards “scheduled hours” and “worked hours” as it wasn’t really clear for the users we tried different way to present it.

— HELLO SUNSHINE ! HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE

It’s time to show you the result of the high-fidelity prototype and jump into the story telling of the prototype.

As you can see, Laure starts the day, she has no tasks yet, she adds her first tasks.

She needs to prepare the slides for a presentation so she creates the taks, she can see that she scheduled 2 hours out of 8 and she worked 0 hours out of 8 as she didn’t start yet.

She is going to click on the task to view the details. The application says that it’s a high priority task, so she can start with this one, she starts the timer.

After 45 minutes she finished the task so she will click on mark task as complete.

Thanks to her productivity she just planted a tree in the forest and update the counters of the day. As you can see she still has scheduled 2 hours but she worked on the task for 45 minutes.

And she is going to add another task, with a medium priority, she begins the second one, and start working, she worked on it for 3 hours, the timer update, and also the theme changes.

As she spent more time working, it’s now day time, so when she marks the task as complete, she already worked half of the day so this is mid day, and the sun is shinning in the forest.

She has a last task to plan, this task is a low priority one, she creates the task and start working on it, once again starts the timer and as the work time is close to the limit, the night theme will appear and she marks task as complete, the coach says the day is over, it’s time to reschedule the task and stop working, because she doesn’t have to worry about this tasks as it’s a low priority task.

— NEXT STEPS

ON BOARDING

We wanted to create an onboarding, in order to explain the concept before the user starts using the app.

PROFILE

We want also to give the users the possibility to setting up their profile at the beginning of the application.

ANIMATIONS

And we would love to develop the task detail pages. Make the timer animated with a tree growing while the users are achieving the task. The idea is to see in first step a leaf, then the trunc and at the end the whole tree. And if the user spends more time on the task than the hours he scheduled, the tree will not look in a good shape, and do not feel well.

ILLUSTRATIONS

We would like to work more on the illustrations to improve it more. We really enjoyed this part during the project but in two weeks it’s very short, so let’s work on it after the bootcamp.

— LEARNINGS

• It was very fun to work on this application. We had a lot of fun to create illustrations trees and landscapes.
• As my partner is a developer, I learned a lot about the technical terms, and what is possible to develop. We discussed about the animations that are possible to do for developers. I learned also about how to communicate with the developers teams, as a designer and understand the constraints of the tools.
• Playing with colors, gradients is not that simple as for paintings because we have to keep a visibility and to stay inclusive. Some layouts can be pretty, but it won’t be read by everyone. So we have to be careful about this and test our prototypes a lot.