Research
Our original design question was “How can we help creatives integrate structure into their daily routine while retaining a fluid approach to inspiration?” This premise was based on the assumption that analytical people have fewer challenges accomplishing their tasks and goals than their creative counterparts. Since creatives typically work in bursts of inspiration, which are inherently unpredictable and unplanned, they are unable to accomplish all their tasks. Also, their tasks tend to have a much longer focus and are comprised of many difficult subtasks. For example, think about creating a painting, a novel, or a music album recording; things that require many hours of constant dedication.
These activities can be highly difficult to complete if you don’t have a tight control over your day-to-day activities. Therefore, we theorized that creative types could benefit from a novel, hybrid schedule that would add structure to their daily routine while retaining sufficient fluidity for any inspirational bursts. Our user research goal was to validate this assumption and discover the specific problem areas that reduce their productivity.
Survey
To validate this theory we ran a 26-question survey across 73 responders, primarily focusing on understanding differences in how people prioritize their time, the amount of technology they use, and the level of structure they prefer.
Given the number of survey answers we had, we decided to do an additional quantitative assessment matrix, focusing on a high/low classification for the four main criteria we’ve selected (which we called the ‘OTSG’ acronym):
Organization level
Technology use
Stress level
Goals focus (Long-term vs Short-term)
We found a significant correlation in the ‘high’ OTSG quadrant between a chunk of four users, in other words, users who scored high in organizational level, technology use, stress, and had a focus on long term goals. These participants scored in the top 5% of each criteria and we found significant similarities in age and educational background. This demographic information became important to our persona creation later in the research phase.
Interview
Our next task was to interview those whose scored particularly high in our quantitative assessment, we were able to interview 2 out of the 4 participants who scored highest in the OTSG assessment. The interview process was designed to last around thirty minutes, and revolved around five specific question groups:
activities/hobbies and how much time is devoted to them
a detailed day-in-the-life walkthrough of the interviewee
their feelings (especially frustration/anxiety) about time management
their goals for time and task management
a request to imagine their solution if there were no constraints (‘how do you imagine the perfect solution to be? It may be futuristic, magic, impossible”)
The participants stressed the importance of what we will call ‘meaningful’ use of their time. While they had different types, strategies, and success rates for time/task management, they all coincided in that they felt a significant chunk of their time was ‘wasted’ on interactions and activities that are menial. Regardless of what the ‘wasted’ time was, the participants wanted to spend less time on those activities and instead devote their time on more useful, meaningful activities.
The ‘imagine a solution’ request was extremely useful in terms of framing the participants’ expectations and ideas of the final design solution. Their ideas mostly focused on having someone or something intelligently manage their activities or categorize them, compile data from multiple sources, or even complete tasks and make decisions in the participant’s name. In short, participants were suggesting AI as a means to increase their focus on meaningful experiences.
Contextual Inquiry
Finally, we ran 4 contextual inquiries, in which we directly followed users while they organized and prioritized their time. We took notes and/or pictures during this process. The two conclusions we made after this study were that participants have wildy different needs and styles, in other words, there is not a “perfect” device for that fits every user’s needs and that most participants did not use a single type of time management system, but multiple technology and non-technology options.
As explained above, our original design question was “How can we help creatives integrate structure into their daily routine while retaining a fluid approach to inspiration?” After reviewing and processing the user feedback, we have redefined the original design questions to be the following: “How do we help people spend their time more meaningfully?”
We believe this is the right question to ask, for the following reasons:
Our initial idea was to focus on giving structure without affecting inspiration. However, our research indicates that the problem is not inspiration, it is the fact that people spend a lot of time on tasks that are trivial and have no real impact on the goals they deem important.
Additionally, we found that this problem stems from the inability of current time management systems to promote an assistive, active methodology for optimizing time. Instead of focusing on structure, we aim to improve the quality of people’s time by reducing the amount of stress they have about their various time management flaws. Thus, our pivot in meaning gives us a much broader canvas and greater opportunity to impact our potential users.
It focuses on a broader set of people, not just “creatives.”
Personas
