ClockedIn

A retro-aesthetic study timer and academic task planner.

Our Process

Our team followed Goal-Directed Design (GDD) methodology, a user-centered approach that prioritizes understanding and designing around user goals, needs, and motivations. This process involved conducting in-depth user research, to ensure that every design decision was grounded in real-world insights that aligned with the behaviors and expectations of our target user base. In our project, we implemented five phases of the GDD process: Research, Modeling, Requirements, Framework, and Refinement.

Research

The Research phase in GDD uses literature reviews, competitive audits, and ethnographic methods to gather qualitative data about users, product domain, and technical constraints. This research reveals behavior patterns that highlight user goals and motivations, forming the basis for personas. The phase ensures that design solutions align with real user needs, business objectives, and the domain's technical realities.

Kickoff Meeting

For our kickoff meeting, we utilized a template to mimic an actual meeting, instead myself and my teammates acted as stakeholders to imagine what might happen during this type of meeting. This allowed us to create a problem and assumption statement through detailed conversation of what we identified as ClockedIn's key goal for users. 

Problem Statement

The current state of the productivity tools domain has focused primarily on motivating students to study. What existing products/services fail to address is engaging students to stay in the app/preventing digital distractions. Our product/service will address this gap by designing Clocked In in a way that helps users achieve focus in their tasks by having gamified interactions (i.e session time leaderboards), accountability measures (synchronous video study calls), and flexible timer modes (i.e Pomodoro). This will improve user’s engagement within the app: encouraging focus, leading to higher customer satisfaction and increased market share. 

Assumption Statement (Examples)

• Who is the user?

• Where does our product fit in their work or life?

• How should our product look and behave?

Literature Review

In order to gain an understanding of ClockedIn's potential context and domain, we conducted a literature review. For this, we researched productivity tools and tech, the effects of technology in academic work, academic competition/gamification, study methods, peer motivation, and digital distractions. 

Key Takeaways

• Students are more likely to engage in digital distractions (scrolling social media, texting, etc.) when they are in clear view (i.e a push notification).

• Research has shown many benefits of learning within a group. These include improvements in drive, augmented comprehension and retention, and heightened eagerness to participate during class. 

• Having competition involved in the learning process makes a space where students can fail, lose, make mistakes, and win that is safe and does not have major consequences to be afraid of.

• Self-monitoring to track productivity (having a record to reflect on), utilizing a reward system, creating a schedule, setting boundaries, and having effective study strategies help with completing academic tasks and maximizing cognitive information processing (short-term and long-term memory).

User Interviews

Before conducting user interviews, our team developed a persona hypothesis to define our ideal interview candidates. This hypothesis was informed by assumed behavioral patterns, needs, demographics, and user environments. We based these assumptions on insights gathered during our literature review and competitive audit, which provided context about our product's domain. As a result, we were able to identify our hypothesized primary persona: University students who want to track their time completing tasks (i.e studying) while also having a gamified aspect to their studying sessions.

Our next step was to conduct user interviews. Given the time constraints of the project, we completed a total of five interviews. Despite the limited sample size, we ensured diversity by recruiting participants from a range of academic majors, allowing us to capture varying experiences—particularly in relation to differences in academic rigor.

The interviews were conducted virtually and lasted between 45 minutes to one hour. Following Goal-Directed Design (GDD) guidelines, we used only open-ended questions to encourage unbiased, in-depth responses from participants. To streamline the interview process, I created a categorized question bank, organizing questions around key themes related to the study experience—including tools and technology use, environmental conditions, habits and routines, digital distractions, and attitudes toward academic competition. I also served as the primary moderator during the interviews, guiding conversations to ensure consistency while allowing participants the freedom to share meaningful insights in their own words.

After completing the user interviews, we conducted an affinity mapping exercise to identify commonalities across participant responses. This method allowed us to uncover patterns in user behaviors, goals, needs, and pain points. By clustering related insights, we were able to synthesize the findings into a well-defined primary persona that accurately represents our target users.

Through this exercise, we observed that users were against the inclusion of academic competition of any form including having a leaderboard system of study times. This meant we would have to pivot away from a core proposed function of our app.

We also observed that users desired a task management aspect to the app, the ability to listen to music, peer interaction (limited), track study time statistics, and have reminders of tasks.

Modeling

The Modeling phase in GDD involves synthesizing research findings into domain and user models (i.e personas). This modeling helps prioritize user needs, define design targets, and ensure a consistent and user-centered design throughout the process.

Identifying Behavioral Variables

Using the observations from our interviews and affinity mapping, we established a singular user role: College students who want to have less distractions while studying and be able to manage academic tasks effectively.

Once we gouped interviewees into that role, we listed out distinct aspects of observed behavior for each role as a set of behavioral variables. We focused on variables under the categories of user activities, aptitudes, motivations, and skills. As per the GDD guidelines of creating 15-30 variables per user role, we created 26 variables.

Examples of Behavioral Variables

• Importance of listening to music while studying (low-high)

• Ease of digital distraction while studying (difficult-easy)

• Usefulness of digital reminders for tasks (not useful-very useful)

• Importance of tracking study time (low-high)

Mapping Interview Subjects to Behavioral Variables

After identifying behavioral variables, we began mapping each interviewee against each variable. To do this, we relied on our interpretation of each interviewee and discussed our reasoning among our team. Finding a precise point wasn't as important as finding a place in relation to other interviewees. The desired outcome of this was to accurately represent how multiple interviewees cluster with respect to each significant variable.

Identifying Significant Behavioral Variables

Using our continuums from before, we identified significant behavior patterns based on interviewee clustering along the ranges. With this information, we synthesized our persona.

Our Persona

Our team developed a user persona based on insights gathered from our interviews. This persona serves as a representation of user behavior, helping us better understand common behavior patterns, motivations, goals, and actions across our target audience. This persona helped us greatly when making informed design decisions, empathizing with the user, and ensuring our product is user-centered.

Requirements

The Requirements phase in GDD involves developing and using problem and vision statements, brainstorming sessions, persona expectations, context scenarios, and a prioritized requirements list. These exercises help with defining what the product must do to meet the needs, goals, and behaviors of its users, bridging research insights with actionable design ideation. 

Problem and Vision Statements

As a team, we created problem and vision statements to establish a clear mandate for our design initiative. Our problem statement served to define the core purpose of the project. 

Although this was a class assignment, we made a conscious effort to shape our problem statement in a way that addressed both business goals and usability challenges, ensuring a more realistic design direction.

Problem Statement:

The current state of the productivity tools domain has focused primarily on motivating students to study. What existing products/services fail to address is engaging students to stay in the app/preventing digital distractions. Our product/service will address this gap by designing Clocked In in a way that helps users achieve focus in their tasks by having accountability measures (do not disturb mode), flexible timer modes, and a task management feature. This will improve user’s engagement within the app: encouraging focus and academic wellness, leading to higher customer satisfaction and increased market share. 

Our vision statement took a user-first approach, focusing on the needs and goals of our target users. It outlined how the design would not only support a better user experience but also contribute to achieving broader business objectives.

Vision Statement:

The design of ClockedIn will help users achieve efficient studying, better time management, and higher academic performance by allowing them to keep track of their time during study sessions, be notified of upcoming tasks, and prevent digital distractions with greater efficiency, ease, and organization, and without problems such as detracted focus, burn out from long study sessions, and disorganization that they currently experience. This will dramatically improve Clocked In’s customer satisfaction ratings and lead to increased user happiness.

Requirements List

Using the information from our brainstorming sessions, persona expectations, and data from interviewees, we were able to create a requirements list. This list would be the foundation of our prototype framework, and establish the necessary functions of our product.

Framework

The Frameworks Phase in GDD involves the creation of a low-fidelity wireframe and a high-fidelity prototype of the product. Once we established our persona and her requirements, we began the phase utilizing the synthesized information from our persona to make justifiable design decisions.

Wireframing

Using FigJam, our team created a low-fidelity wireframe to visualize the structure, layout, and core requirements of our product before moving into high-fidelity design. This blueprint was instrumental in shaping our information architecture and mapping out two scenario paths: the key-path (pink line), representing the common user journey, and the validation path (green line), capturing less frequent interactions.

As team leader, I led the design of the onboarding flow and home/timer screen, ensuring that these foundational elements aligned with user needs and project goals. I also reviewed and provided constructive feedback on my teammates’ screens, promoting a culture of open dialogue and iterative critique. Throughout the process, I prioritized team input and maintained clear communication to ensure our design remained cohesive and user-centered.

Our Prototype

After completing our wireframe, we transitioned into prototyping using Figma. To stay efficient and meet deadlines, we divided tasks based on the screens each team member had previously developed during wireframing. I was responsible for fully prototyping the onboarding tutorial, and home/timer screens, ensuring they were both functional and visually aligned with our design vision. To view the ClockedIn prototype, click the image below (or the button underneath)!

My Screens

All screens were created in alignment witht the 8pt grid.

Refinement

The Refinement phase in GDD involves focuses on polishing and validating the design, including conducting usability testing. The goal of this phase is to ensure the design not only meets user needs but is also feasible, accessible, and ready for handoff to the development team. 

Usability Testing

After creating our prototype, we conducted 2 usability tests to determine any issues or flaws within our prototype. We had users say their thoughts aloud, known as think-aloud protocol (TAP) while going through the app.

Key Takeaways:

• Users described finding the navigation confusing upon first entering the app

• Users disliked the statistics page graph label placement 

Solutions:

• I created a tutorial section to the app after usability testing

• We edited the statistics page, adjusting the numerical labels to align better

Conclusion

After 8 weeks of collaboration, our team successfully delivered the prototype of ClockedIn. At the midway point of the project, we encountered a major challenge: our user research revealed that my proposed core features for the product didn’t align with user needs. As team leader, I guided the team through this unexpected pivot by encouraging open dialogue, reassessing our goals, and facilitating quick yet thoughtful decision-making. By fostering an open and adaptive team environment, I helped refocus our efforts around a more user-centered direction. This experience strengthened my ability to lead through challenges and bring out the best in my teammates during moments of uncertainty.