As the UI/UX Designer, I designed a 3 major flows within Take5's mobile app that coaches remote workers towards wellness throughout the work day.
4 weeks
Alysha Jean Charles
UX Research (Competitive analysis, User Testing), Lofi Sketching
My Role
UX Research (Research synthesis, Usability Testing)
UX Design (Lofi Sketching, Hifi Mockup, Prototyping)
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Neeharika Tummala
A pre-seed startup, Take5 is mobile calendar app that helps remote workers take breaks throughout their day to reduce fatigue due to meeting-packed days in a non-office environment. With the help of machine learning, the app suggests breaks based on the user's work schedule and preferences.
A tool that can help HR heads of software companies solve the problem of low engagement by enabling employees to take breaks which help increase productivity and lower churn rates.
As a result of the pandemic, remote workers are working longer days with fewer breaks, ultimately leading to low engagement levels and increased turnover rates. Our client tasked us to design an early prototype of a mobile calendar app that integrates machine learning and helps prevent remote workers from burnout and chronic stress throughout their workday.
Our solution was to design a break coach that would ensure workers take necessary wellness breaks throughout their day while also respecting scheduled engagements.
We took this opportunity to gain a better understanding of the problem space through competitive analysis, synthesizing the user interview notes that we were provided, and generating a user persona.
We studied the competition and identified any areas of opportunity.
Our client had previously conducted 20 user interviews representing employees, managers, and senior leaders with a diverse demography across age, sex, marital status, and location.
To better understand user frustrations and pain-points, we used affinity mapping to generate themes and insights from the gathered data.
1. Reactive time blocking is a defense mechanism
People are often double or triple booked into meetings that are irrelevant to them. Reactive time blocking is an existing solution that people use to avoid these meetings, but is detrimental to employee relationships as it can lead to resentment.
2. Workers feel guilty for taking breaks
Workers feel guilty for taking breaks because no one else does it. They would feel more comfortable taking breaks if it were normalized by their superiors so that the rest of the employees can follow suite.
3. Calendars aren't adaptive
Not every meeting or task is created equally. There needs to be flexibility and versatility in the user's fluctuating calendar. When a meeting is booked over a scheduled break, people forfeit their break as they feel obligated to attend the meeting which leads to increased fatigue levels.
4. It is difficult to decompress with back-to-back meetings
When people are pulled into back-to-back meetings, this adds to the stress and fatigue because there is no mental break. People need time to digest information at the end of each meeting to alleviate their cognitive load from meeting to meeting.
Our client had prompted us to focus on several key flows: Registration & Onboarding, Managing breaks, and Managing meetings. Using our research findings, we began brainstorming solutions and mapping out the user flows.
As we began to explore a number of solutions during the Divergent Thinking process, putting pen-to-paper and creating a story board helped me think wide and visualize possible outcomes.
The user flows allowed us to hypothesize on how the app could take on an adaptive approach when there is fluidity in the users calendar. We wanted to map out the most impactful interactions that would enable users to successfully take their scheduled breaks.
Drawing inspiration from prominent calendar apps such as Google and Apple, we began sketching out our initial designs in preparation for our upcoming usability tests.
Our next step was to create the wireframes in preparation for our upcoming usability tests.
We wanted to focus on the happy paths so that we could deliver an early prototype that would showcase the solutions. However, one prominent edge case weighed heavy on our minds:
Assuming not everyone in the organization chooses to use Take5 as their main work calendar, what would a non-Take5 user, ie) Google Cal user, see when a meeting is scheduled via the Take5 app and vice versa?
From a technical standpoint, we envisioned the simplest solution for Google Cal users would be to receive all Take5 correspondents through their emails.
In the case where Google Cal users creates a meeting invitation, we would need to consult with the dev team to discuss how this would work for Take5 users, but ideally, it would be scheduled through email and then added onto their external calendar first.
✅ On the third day of waiting, we made the collective decision to proceed with our scheduled usability tests. We forfeited the wireframes and put our low-fidelity sketches in front of our users because testing our early designs with real users trumped a pretty wireframe.
We recruited 4 full-time remote workers to participate in our guerrilla usability tests. Participants were a software engineer, an interactive designer, a recruiting specialist and a Financial Analyst.
To determine whether participants were able to complete the benchmarked tasks without any major usability issues. As some of the features would be new and foreign to them, it was important that we observed their initial reactions and behaviors to help determine whether they would be viable features for the final prototype.
1. Users expect a certain level of clairvoyance
During the onboarding flow, our users indicated that they would expect the app to plan out their breaks for them with minimal effort on their part.
2. Transparency messages seemed like a novel feature
The idea of sending transparency messages to colleagues seemed like an interesting idea, but users were skeptical on whether the quick messages would be suitable to send to their managers.
3. New features need to be explained
Unfamiliar features require an explanation for users to understand its purpose. We discovered that the meeting buffer feature needed to be better explained to avoid confusion.
Establishing the UI for the high-fidelity mockups.
Piggybacking on the client’s pre-selected color palette, I began to create the look and feel of the app. Because Take5 was to be used during work hours, I wanted to ensure that the UI elements would reflect a sense of professionalism yet still embody a sense of calm. The blended blues in the background give a serene and tranquil feeling. The dark UI put less stress on the eyes and contrasted well with the color palette.
We created the High-Fidelity Mockups, conducted another round of usability tests, and iterated based on the learnings--all while sending the deliverables to our client as we went.
🔗 Click here for these detailed designs, usability test learnings, and iterations.
Nearing the end of our 4 week timeframe, our client finally responded and advised that although the features were great, we left out a crucial interaction: Machine Learning screens
Our current designs were archaic, required too much work from the user, and didn't feel personable. The new experience needed to be tailored to the user in order to create an effortless and delightful experience.
We went back and iterated on the designs with the intent to incorporate screens and interactions that would support machine learning and enhance the user experience by making it feel more personalized.
Getting rid of the "questionnaire" during onboarding and utilizing the user's integrated calendar to extract the necessary information to create an effortless, personable, and tailored user experience.
Participants spent a longer period of time reading the content on this page which disrupted the overall flow. By breaking up the preferences and reworking the visual hierarchy, it alleviates the user's cognitive load and improves readability.
After a break, the system will ask for feedback in order to learn the behaviors and habits of the user so that over time, the app can create a more tailored user experience.
1. Effortless user onboarding and break scheduling
Take5 extracts essential information from the integrated calendar and quickly learns the user's habits and creates an adaptive schedule, making onboarding and schedule setup quick and effortless.
2. Integrates wellness apps to enhance breaks and learns from user habits
Take5 integrates with existing wellness apps to give the user an immersive break. The app learns the user's habits and curates content based on its findings.
3. Creates transparency between colleagues to foster trust
Whenever a user declines a meeting invitation, there is an option to send the organizer a transparency message indicating why the meeting won't work. This helps reduce reactive time blocking and fosters trust between colleagues.
If a user accepts a meeting and their meeting buffers are turned on, there is an option to let the organizer know they will be 10 minutes late.
4. Normalizing walking meetings as an alternative to rescheduling a break
Meeting organizers can allow walking meetings so that employees can accomplish two things at once.
Try your hand at creating and managing wellness breaks using Take5.
By testing early, it helped us understand what users expect from an app like Take5. It also consequently helped us eliminate an entire user flow that would have been time consuming to create.
The biggest struggle we had was establishing a constant line of communication with our client. Despite our best efforts, there were often times where the client would be unreachable for days at a time and we were forced to continue on with the project in order to stay on track with our timeline.
I enjoying working closely with another designer throughout the entire process. Although we worked autonomously at times, we had some great collaborative sessions where our ideas could grow and transform.
Our current app takes a mobile first approach and focuses heavily on notifications as well as the creation and outcome of Take5 breaks. It would be worth exploring the implementation of a desktop application or extension which would house all the features of the app on people's existing work calendars.
One aspect of the app which would greatly impact user engagement is by integrating a social aspect where users would be able to hold each other accountable for taking breaks. It would be interesting to see users encouraging one another to take breaks; thereby further normalizing breaks to break up long workdays.
