Taskmate
OVERVIEW
As a teacher with an interest in the productivity space and creating systems to increase efficiency, I became intrigued by the different ways my colleagues were tracking and managing tasks.
Taskmate is conceptual mobile app that helps teachers manage, organize, and schedule tasks to maximize the use of teachers' non-instructional time and minimize stress and burnout.
ROLE & TIMELINE
Sole UX/UI Designer
8 weeks, Spring 2023
Context
They say teaching is like having a hundred balls thrown at you all at once and someone just yells ‘CATCH!’
Every day, educators step into classrooms teeming with diverse needs, expectations, and challenges, much like a barrage of balls hurtling through the air. In this educational juggling act, teachers must simultaneously manage curriculum planning and delivery, student engagement, behavioral issues, and administrative tasks…and that only barely covers the surface.
One survey found that elementary teachers have an average of only 47 minutes of planning time each day, which is approximately 10% of their workday. This time is crucial for providing high-quality instruction to facilitate students’ pandemic recovery in education. Unfortunately, this time can be unreliable and inconsistent for teachers, leading to burnout and high turnover.
Problem
Teachers need a way to effectively manage their tasks to maximize their non-instructional time in order to complete tasks efficiently and minimize burnout.
On top of the regular instructional duties and responsibilities, there's a constant onslaught of managing student behaviors, mediating conflicts and student interactions, responding to parent inquiries, fulfilling requests from school service providers, juggling post-pandemic safety regulations while all keeping your head above water.
While more planning time for teachers can’t really be made without systemic changes in the education system, what if tasks can be done in a more systematic and efficient way so that when the 100 proverbial balls are thrown at them at once, they know which ones to catch?
User Research
Teachers are responsible for much more than planning lessons during their non-instructional time
As a former teacher, I understood this deeply. In conducting interviews with 9 teachers with professional experience ranging from early childhood to high school across multiple states, and school types (public, private, and charter), I found that last-minute requests from school admin, mediating student conflicts, and unexpected parent communications were among the unplanned events that occur frequently for teachers.
By digging further into teachers’ behaviors and habits on how they use their non-instructional time and using an affinity map to analyze user insights, I found further commonalities:
1
Participants reserved certain tasks for specific parts of their schedule.
Experienced teachers no longer used the organizational strategies they found success with from earlier in their career.
3
Teachers (almost) unanimously agree that prioritization is the key to staying on top of things.
The common thread that connected the majority of the participants' travel planning experiences was the time and effort it took to research, gather, organize, sort, and plan the day-to-day activities of a trip. From the research, we narrowed down the scope of our product to address the following:
Secondary Research
News flash: We should not be multitasking!
Intrigued at the commonalities in participants’ experiences and curious about the shared value placed in the prioritization of tasks, I conducted further research that revealed valuable insights to better understand focus and productivity from a scientific point of view in order to enhance teachers' approach to task completion.
Studies have found that:
The common thread that connected the majority of the participants' travel planning experiences was the time and effort it took to research, gather, organize, sort, and plan the day-to-day activities of a trip. From the research, we narrowed down the scope of our product to address the following:
Ideation
Reimagining productivity for teachers
As mentioned previously, simply giving teachers more planning time within the school day requires many changes at the systemic level. Often, how teachers use their non-instructional time is also determined by required collaboration meetings and professional development workshops.
Based off of my user research insights, my ideation focused on what teachers themselves can control, such as more efficient ways to track and manage tasks, and how to ways to identify and and commit to high-priority tasks.
Research Insights
HMW
1
Participants had dedicated times for specific tasks
How might we give teachers a way to organize and a assign tasks to specific times?
2
Experienced teachers no longer used the organizational strategies they found success with from earlier in their career
How might we make task management easy and efficient?
3
Teachers (almost) unanimously agree that prioritization is the key to staying on top of things
How might we allow teachers to effectively prioritize and complete prioritized tasks?
How might we exploration
User Flows
Identifying the essential user flows of the MVP
From ideation exercises, I focused on two primary user goals for the minimum viable product (MVP) that would guide users through the essential elements of the user experience.
Add a Task
Uses Natural Language Input for ease and efficiently, with prioritization features such as setting a reminder and flagging high-priority tasks.
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Schedule and Assign Tasks
Keeps users focused on their workflow by scheduling tasks to specific non-instructional time blocks.
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Interface Design
Centering on a teacher-focused productivity interface
Between generating sketches and mid-fidelity wireframes, I found an opportunity to move from a more generic task management app to one that better served teachers with the inclusion of task organization by class or by lesson. These shifts included grouping tasks by class and organizing lists in an agenda that reflects a teacher's schedule to align the product to reflect a teacher’s workday.
However, there was something about this solution that just didn't click, but I couldn’t yet put my finger on why.
A snapshot of mid-fidelity wireframe explorations
Back to the drawing board…
Arranging tasks based on class schedules didn't fit users' real available time
Grouping tasks by class does provide a layer of organization and structure, particularly for any teacher who has ever needed to plan a last-minute lesson. However, considering studies on the drawbacks of context-switching—like reduced focus and increased stress—I refocused the product to focus on task batching.
Task batching involves grouping similar tasks together to complete at once. This solution not only takes teachers' schedules into consideration, but also adreeses teachers' reported challenges of being subjected to frequent distractions during non-instructional time and time constraints.
This led to a shift in the product's direction and a new hypothesis.
Hypothesis
By allowing users to batch and schedule tasks at specific times of the day, users will be more likely to perform focused work and complete tasks within the scheduled time.
High-Fidelity Wireframing
KISS (Keep it Simple and Serene) for teachers
In bringing the designs into high-fidelity, it was important to ensure that the visual style and UI stuck a balance between a professional yet calming tone.
With the addition of task batching, users would now be able to use the tags assigned to each task to batch similar dasks together prior to assigning the tasks to a time slot.
A third simple but essential user flow of completing tasks was added because the point, after all, is not just for users to organize and track their tasks, but for them to complete them as well.
Select screens from Onboarding flow
Adding tasks with the help of natural language processing
Select multiple tasks to batch, complete, or mark as a priority task
Usability Testing + Impact
Users found the product valuable in addressing their teacher-specific needs, and they could easily complete each task given
Once the high-fidelity prototype was complete, I conducted moderated usability tests with 5 school-based K-12 teachers. In the usability test, I incorporated an additional user flow of completing a task to lead users to their primary goal of completing tasks
Overall, users found the product easy to use, with a few opportunities for improved clarity in the text elements. These were addressed through iterations that led to the final solution.
Final Solution
A productivity app for teachers to optimize task management and time blocking
Natural Language Input easily helps you tag and schedule tasks.
You can also prioritize your tasks and see them at the top of your daily list so you can tackle the most important tasks first.
Batch similar tasks and schedule them to a time block.
Say goodbye to wasted time and make the most of your sacred non-instructional time to stay on top of your workload and manage your energy.
Learnings
It took multiple rounds of ideating—even going back to the drawing board to iterate some more—to land on the task-batching solution. This experience showed me the value of exploring multiple different options, seeking feedback, and trusting my instincts. What helped drive the final product at each step of ideating and designing is centering the solution around data-driven research, and applying it to the targeted users of this project.
Other work…
Designing a 0→1 MVP to help travelers create optimized routes for their daily travel itinerary
Saving audio clips and transcripts for engaged podcast listeners and learners
Helping language learners practice travel-relevant conversations with real-time feedback
