App-spirational

As a student and active volunteer at Annex Theatre as well as someone who is exploring the field of web design and consultation, I have been tracking my time spent as well as mood to get an accurate reflection of how well I am spending my time. After about 6 months of tracking, when people ask, “About how many hours do you spend at Annex?” I can now answer that is on average 20 hours/week. Actively inputting my hours into a form each day has also increased my outlook as to how I choose to spend my time. Since tracking, I now set aside time to go to the gym or engage in relaxing downtime activities, since I’m fully aware of how much time I put into “working” that day.

I also included a quick feedback section in my protoype form that enabled me to reflect on how I felt about how I spent my time. The idea sprang from wanting to get data-based feedback about how I truly felt after time spent volunteering or working a specific client, as opposed to the general feeling of stress and malaise that I was experiencing. I chose 3 levels of reaction to every event: empowered, neutral, and defeated. My hope is to see overall trends and use this information to make change as well.

I’d like to share my technique with others who are interested in tracking time to make improvements. For WEB 202 at Seattle Central with Kathy Gill, I discovered how to make this idea more useful for myself and potentially others. For the course I researched potential users of a time tracking app by creating personas, read about other similar products in order to design my differently, and design the navigation, look, and feel of an app from start to finish. From the perspective of learning UX design, I achieved what I set out to do: successfully explore and research potential interactions and design a time tracking app.

Categorized in: Research, UX Design