TimeHack

Inspiration

One of the members on our team has ADHD and she has struggled to find an app or service that has been able to help her manage her schoolwork and time in general. She thought that something more flexible would be useful, instead of a software that just forgets about a task once the due date set for it has passed.

What it does

Our design offers users a way to create tasks and then automatically have them scheduled throughout the day/week in the way that they choose. For example, if a user’s goal is to play 7 hours of piano by Sunday, he can set the calendar to split up the task in 1 hour daily increments. In order to ease some of the anxiety, the user will get a notification when it is time to start the task. If the user starts the task, then an internal timer will start inside the app (this will later aid the app AI into suggesting how long a task will take when the user is filling out that field). If the user doesn’t mark the task as completed and it runs over the time of another scheduled task, the calendar will automatically shift tasks in order to accommodate the extra time. The same thing happens if the task wasn’t started in the first place. Limits can be set for this within both calendar settings and task settings. For example, the user can set a limit for how late tasks can be pushed in a day and a task won’t be pushed down beyond that limit if it’s marked as due by the end of that day, or past a certain time that day if the time is specified within the task.

How we built it

We sketched out a couple of ideas on paper first and wrote out a couple of storyboards. After that, we began translating our designs into Adobe Xd and added some interactions.

Challenges we ran into

When we first started, we definitely had some trouble narrowing our design down into something that was doable within the time constraints. We had a lot of ideas for different features, but we had to narrow it down to what would essentially be the MVP.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We actually interviewed a couple of our friends that also have ADHD and that helped us feel like our prototype was on the right track to help out our user population.

What we learned

From our interviews, we found out that the main problem that students with ADHD have is that the idea of a strict schedule gives them anxiety, but a too-relaxed schedule doesn’t offer them motivation. For example, one student mentioned that using a calendar felt too restrictive because once he missed the start time for one task, that started a sort of “domino effect” in his brain where he just pictured all the other scheduled tasks being affected by it as well and he said that it caused him a lot of anxiety. He also said he tried software where tasks weren’t necessarily scheduled, but that it ended up being too overwhelming because the tasks just kept piling up and it just ended up being one big chunk of unfinished/not started tasks, which also caused him anxiety.

Apart from that, we definitely learned a lot more about designing/prototyping and we got to use some design techniques that we hadn't previously used before!

What's next for TimeHack

We have a couple of ideas on what to do next. For starters, we would gather a larger user population just so we can make sure that our app is useful for users with different degrees of ADHD. We also thought it would be cool to add a sort of point system to keep users motivated to continue finishing everything on time and maybe add a way to contact people and let them know that you have to reschedule if the task is related to them, like adding a task creation page that lets the user specify whether the task is “social” or not and maybe let them input the contact info of the people that are involved with that task.

Built With

• adobexd