Boost your productivity by tracking your to-dos, events and notes.
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I noticed that most productivity apps just have task lists for your to-dos and events, and don't engage the user. Users can’t keep track of the progress of their goals and these apps lack features which make it difficult to adopt productivity as a habit.
Trodo is a productivity application which lets users track their to-dos, events and notes. To build Trodo, I validated my assumptions, created the information architecture, designed wireframes and prototypes, and developed the app. With Trodo, users can keep track of their goals by tagging all their tasks, events and notes to those specific goals and see exactly how much they have accomplished over a period of time.
Trodo is live on both, the App Store and on the Play Store. Download Trodo and boost your productivity.
Trodo is a productivity application which lets users track their to-dos, events and notes. Users can keep track of their goals by tagging all their tasks, events and notes to those specific goals and see exactly how much they have accomplished over a period of time.
I wanted a good productivity app as I felt that keeping track of all my tasks and events was overwhelming. I found it difficult to remember how each task or event is associated to my personal goals and how they contribute to me achieving those goals.
When I looked for good productivity apps to download, I noticed that most of them just have task lists for your to-dos and events, and don't engage the user. There's no way for users to keep track of the progress of their goals and the tasks and events tagged to those goals. These apps lack features that make it easy to adopt productivity as a habit.
“I find most productivity apps boring. They don’t have anything new and exciting that motivates me to keep adding new tasks everyday”
In order to increase productivity, the process of regularly completing tasks needs to become a habit. However, if productivity were to become a habit, productivity apps need to have the features like tracking goals, tasks, events, notes and most importantly being able to tag these to personalizable goals.
I envisioned the app to be something different from regular productivity apps. I assumed that users would be hooked to the product if there was an element of social validation and an ability for users to stay consistent with their beliefs. I postulated that activity rings associated with tasks would help motivate people to complete their tasks everyday. This led me to do research to gather insights and strengthen my assumptions.
Another important part of the background research I conducted was a survey which I sent out to around 70 people to validate my hypothesis regarding the problem space. While social validation and the feature to take notes weren't popular, the other features made sense to users.
After validating my assumptions, I listed down key features and constructed the information architecture to start building the application. I decided to have the Notes feature along with Tasks and Events in order to facilitate note-taking and tagging the notes to goals, as a form of testing my assumption that people would benefit from it.
The information architecture greatly helped with the wireframing process. I was inspired by the Google Fit app in the visualization of the features. The flow of the app however, was intended to mimic the flow of common productivity and activity tracking apps.
As an engineer, I couldn't help but think about the development process as I created the wireframes. It was challenging to distance myself from what development platform I wanted to use and the libraries associated with those platforms. I decided on a few features with the constraint of libraries and the technological feasibility of those features.
I felt that a feasibility analysis at a later stage would have prevented design restrictions but I realized that constraints nurture creativity. The added limitation of potential technology constraints helped me create features which could be communicated in a simpler manner.
I established a design style guide to help standardize all the elements I needed to create the high-fidelity prototype. I picked distinct, contrasting colors to differentiate between the 3 primary types of goals- Skills, Subjects and Personal. I chose simple icons from the Feather Icons library to make development easier. Roboto was chosen as it’s a great font for reading text and allows letters to take up as much space as needed.
“First to market wins”
Due to time constraints and the urge to build and release the app, I decided to convert the wireframes to a high-fidelity prototype in order to start the development process as soon as possible.
The prototype was intended to showcase key features of the app which were designed to tackle the problem of productivity apps not being engaging enough.
Tagging tasks and events to specific goals gives users a sense of direction and accomplishment which helps them stay consistent in completing these tasks.
Trodo makes productivity fun by showing you all your tasks in the form of Productivity Rings. Completing the rings makes users feel a personal sense of success.
Seeing tasks, events and notes in a daily, weekly and monthly view in different levels of granularity encourages users to stay consistent with their habits and observe trends.
As I set out to develop this app, I knew that I wanted to code this for Android and iOS. So, I had to decide between React-native, Flutter, Java and Swift.
Since Flutter is relatively new, I reckoned that React-native would have more support in terms of components and tutorials. React-native has some useful features like
The features helped make the development process easier and more intuitive.
As the development process progressed, I realized that the initial set of features I envisioned for the app were beyond the scope of development (with React-Native). I had to improvise certain aspects of the information architecture and the wireframes in designing the final product according to the libraries and components I could use and worked with a freelance React-native developer to build the app.
In hindsight, I would have liked to run the wireframes and prototypes through more iterations and user testing before the development of the app. The development of this app had to be expedited due to the limited availability of the other React-Native developer and the urgency to get an MVP out to the market.
In the near future, I plan on adding new features to the the app, some of which would look like-
Trodo is currently free to use and doesn't require users to create an account. The data isn't collected since it is stored on the user's device locally. However, when I introduce account creation to Trodo, I will need to integrate authentication APIs and also offer storage on the cloud. These features would require Trodo users to pay a fee through a subscription model (annual/ monthly).