
Welcome to the captivating journey of creating the ultimate digital planner for iPad. This UX case study explores the mission to craft a digital solution that benefits both avid users of physical planners and digital enthusiasts.
Through an iterative design process that lasted 8 awe-inspiring weeks, our dedicated team transformed countless rough sketches and ideas into a polished, high-fidelity prototype.
Prepare to embark on an adventure through planning reinvented, as we uncover the secrets of designing for the digital and physical aficionados alike. Dive into the mind-blowing process that led to the conception of this one-of-a-kind digital planner for iPad.
For this project I was the Lead UX Designer.
I was responsible for establishing the design system, managing components, advanced prototyping based on user flows, user testing and implementing user testing insights. I often led a lot of the design thinking exercises such as identifying trends and patterns from user feedback, understanding how our product fits into the market, and defining the research questions that would propel our work.
I was also responsible for managing our product schedule, organizing meetings, delegating work, maintaining documentation of our process and ensuring team was in alignment and coordinating our pizza parties :)
Basics
Intensive Design Sprint
Physical & Digital United
Ultimate Planner Experience
This was a passion project that 5 brilliant individuals came together to make the ultimate planner experience.
Key Deliverables
For the proactive planner, picking between digital and physical planner can be a difficult choice.
Physical planners enjoy the freedom enabled by freehand writing (color coding, drawings, arrows), the satisfying joy of crossing of a difficult task from their checklist, and customizing their planner how they like it. However, physical planners are required to have their planner on their person at all times, meaning forgetting your planner can be a hassel when it comes to remember what their agenda is for the day or even writing in new tasks.
Digital planners like the convenience of synchronizing their agenda across multiple devices but miss out on the freedom and customization options that are possible with physical paper planners.
The project objective is to create a practical digital solution for users of paper planners that reaps the benefits of both mediums while allowing the interface to be clean, uncluttered and user friendly interface.
Based on our research, we learned that there would be three main challenges to consider if we wanted to create a product that was viable enough for users to want to switch.
Users Are Fearful And Overwhelmed With Learning New Tools
Some tools have a huge learning curve and the change that is supposed to make things "better" can ultimately slow down progress and inhibit efficiency, because of all the time spent having to relearn things.
Feeling that Digital and Physical are Very Different
How digital planners and physical planners interact with their respective tools can be wildly different and asking them to switch to a different medium requires careful thought with how their planning methods will look like interms of planner layout, interactions, inputs and more.
People are not always fond of change
Users of planners tend to have their own established system that works well for them and having to impose a drastic change in how they do things currently can mean a lot of resistance when it comes to how the new solution. This is especially true when people have committed to a system for several years.
We want to create a digital planner that has:
An Intuitive and simple UI
We want users to be able to pick up the planner and immediately understand what is they are looking at and how to interact with the planner without having to search for help.
Find a Happy Medium between Digital and physical planner interactions
We want to empower the freedom that users receive with pen and paper (sticky notes, drawings, etc) while still granting users the many useful benefits of having a digital planners (different calendar views, tags, reminders, etc)
make this "change" as painless and possible
We want to consider how users currently interact with their planners, understand what tasks and features are most important to them and make Plan.it's version as similar as possible. We want it to feel natural and like the users are using an upgraded version of their current system.
How might we...
create a digital planner that is intuitive and user-friendly for physical planner users?