Designing Done:
Why Do We Need Another To-Do App?
UI / UX Design
Project Brief
Create a to-do app that helps users break down their day and send personalized push notifications.
My role:
I worked on the UI/UX Design by defining pain points and analyzing similar apps on the market.
The Team:
Jevin Sew worked on the development and helped me create the user experience.

Problems with Current To-Do Apps
I set out to research to-do apps and identified areas where certain workflows were not being met. Along with the creation of a to-do, the following factors bring market opportunities to a new to-do app. By completing heuristic evaluations, sending out surveys, and reading feedback reviews, I learned what was most important to the users within a to-do app and the pain points affecting them.
Persistent Issues
- Push notifications are sent at the wrong time and often missed.
- Creating a new to-do is often slow and buried behind multiple screens and clicks.
- Notifications are not customizable or tailored to the user.
What We Wanted to Give Users
- The ability to quickly create to-dos.
- The ability to choose how often & when notifications are sent.
The Design Process
- Define the problem.
- Define the target audience.
- Research & define users’ needs.
- Draw sketches & create wireframes.
- Get user feedback by A/B testing.
- Redesign problematic interfaces using feedback received from users.
- Prototype final product.

Problems & Pain Points Affecting Users’ Workflow
- Organization — The apps were organized by day, but reviewers stated they’d prefer to organize by parts of the day.
- Push Notifications — Users cannot enable push notifications more than once without creating multiple to-dos. In turn, users miss notifications.
- Navigation — Users have a hard time adding, editing, or marking a to-do complete.
- Onboarding — Users must sign up with their email and wait for verification before they can even use the app. In this time two to-dos can be completed.
Hearing the Users’ Voices
Taking a look at feedback reviews of Any.do and Todoist as well as input from users, it was obvious that notifications and day breakdown needed to be prioritized.

Understanding the Users’ Preferences
Graphs and survey responses told me what was most important to the users. These also helped me figure out what was missing from user's current workflow. As you can see, notifications & day breakdown was most common.

Beginning Sketches
We drew a few sketches of what we imagined the interface to be like considering how the users may use it. These detailed the overview of tasks as well as the interface. The sketches helped us brainstorm how we could change then interface after receiving feedback.


The First & Second Interface
Although our initial concept allowed for easy access to upcoming days, we learned that this design was not ideal. Based on the feedback, we tried three different approaches to switching between days.
- The first interface felt cluttered at the top of the screen which caused users to have issues changing from day to day.
- Though the second interface was cleaner the top of it was still cluttered.

The Final Product
After taking feedback from users and understanding what would best fit them, we came up with our final interface.
- With this interface, we made sure to incorporate easy switching which signaled there was more content to access.
Conclusion
Based on the surveys, small-scale testing, and feedback, we created a to-do app that best matches our target user’s needs. Done also helps users break down their day and get the most from their to-do list.
What can I do better?
- Have a group of users to share updates with overtime rather than at one specific time.
- Use a tool such as User Testing to gather feedback from a broader audience.
What we are aware we did wrong
- We did not have a defined audience for testing and feedback. In turn, we used mutiple audiences. This led us to test slowly and not have solid feedack.
Though there has been a break in the development of Done, we are still keeping the user’s needs in mind while we finish work on the product.
Questions?
If you have any questions about Done please feel free to reach out or say hello: [email protected]