The idea for this project came to me as many great ideas do—in the shower one mundane morning. I was starting a blog and lamenting the agony of the writing process. I wondered how many amazing writers were out there who never realized their potential because they struggled with their writing process. I thought, what if there was an app that helped with those early stages of writing? What would that look like? I decided to go through the end-to-end process of designing a mobile application to find out.
Writers brim with creative ideas, but all too often, those gems end up as lonely post-it notes on a cluttered desktop. This not only leads to a time-consuming struggle with organizing thoughts but also detracts from the precious moments spent actually putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys).
A mobile app that introduces an organizational system where users can effortlessly combine and edit their thoughts. Imagine dragging and dropping text blocks like arranging pieces of a puzzle – making the creative journey smoother and more enjoyable.
To kick off the project, I evaluated the current landscape of mobile apps that purported to teach and support creative writers. I looked at strengths and weaknesses of each and did a brief feature analysis to start gathering potential specs for the product.
Video learning sites like MasterClass and Udemy were great for learning theory, but did not actually give blossoming writers the chance to put pen to paper. I would need to decide whether my app would focus on teaching writing or helping writers with their practice.
Only one product was mobile-first (Werdsmith), and most products were focused entirely on their desktop offerings. This made some sense, as writing is typically associated with having a keyboard. But this also meant that there was a gap in the market and that if I could leverage the unique abilities of a mobile app, I would have a competitive product.
Many products focused on helping with composition and grammar - but there weren’t many options for writers who were struggling to even get started.
I spoke with 6 hobbyist writers: some were bloggers, some were avid journalers, and others were eternally working on drafts for fantasy worlds that never saw the light of day.
Through these conversations, I wanted to discover:
Using the insights gained from my research, I put together a persona that encapsulated my users’ goals, motivations, frustrations, and needs.
Since writing is such a complex process, I created a user journey map to target the stages of writing that were most frustrating for users. This turned out to be the formative stage, when Georgia is trying to navigate the leap from an idea banging around in her head to a piece of writing.
To guide an exploration of potential solutions, I reframed the insights from my user research into how-might-we questions.
Despited being inspired, Georgia is a bit anxious about writing everything down—ideas of what she wants to say are slipping away even as they come to her.
Georgia’s trying to remember an idea she had a few weeks ago that’s related to the blog post she’s currently writing. But trying to remember what it was and digging through her notebook has distracted her and now she’s lost her train of thought and is stuck in her writing.
Georgia is getting caught up in a cycle of endlessly revising to try and improve the flow of her writing, but it’s causing her to miss writing down some important ideas.
I brainstormed possible solutions for my problem statements and then grouped similar solutions into a heat map so I could see which solutions had the broadest application to potential user problems.
I then took those groupings and plotted them on an impact/effort matrix to determine which features would be most integral to the user experience and therefore comprise the MVP.
In order to draw clear connections between user needs and the decisions surrounding what would go into the MVP, I tied my MVP features back to the problem statements.
How might we help Georgia capture her ideas in moments of inspiration? ➔ Design short-form text inputs meant for quickly jotting down an idea to come back to later.
How might we help Georgia quickly call up previous ideas that might be related to her new ideas? ➔ Allow her to create and add categories to ideas to start grouping them into themes and topics.
How might we help Georgia quickly reorganize her writing so that she can focus on getting her ideas onto the page? ➔ Design a text editor that functions on a block system, allowing the user to quickly rearrange paragraphs and swap ideas in and out.
I mapped out the user’s journey from opening the app to completing and exporting their writing, breaking out key task flows for adding their ideas to a document, adding a tag to an idea, and exporting their document.
Based on market research, I knew that my main user base would be female, so I didn’t shy away from using feminine colors. Jot would embody a colorful, creative aesthetic offset by the pristine white of a blank page. I chose a simple sans serif font for the UI elements and stuck to the classic feel of a serif font for the text editor.
I sketched out a few versions of key screens in the app: the home screen, the new idea screen, and the document editing screen. I then put these sketches in front of potential users for a second opinion and discovered a few crucial insights.
While the general consensus was that the home screen should show the most recent ideas and documents created by the user, questions came up about how the screen would adjust if the user had hundreds of items in the app.
Certain key functionalities of the app were indicated only by icons and buttons. There were some concerns raised about whether users would be able to intuit navigating the app without text labeling these actions.
Users were unequivocally drawn to familiar UI patterns, citing that they preferred the screen layouts that mimicked popular word processor apps like Google Docs.
To quickly capture their thoughts, users can create ideas, which are short-form blocks of text. They can also create and add tags to these ideas, so that they can start grouping their thoughts into topics and themes, and quickly call up ideas later on when they’re ready to write.
Docs are longer forms that function similar to a traditional word processor. However, their unique value lies in the ability for users to insert ideas they’ve already created directly into the document, then edit, expand, and rearrange those ideas using the drag handles.
When users are done using Jot to capture, organize, and write about their ideas, they can use the export menu to save their doc as a PDF, RTF, or TXT file to share and upload as they see fit.
20% of testers said that they didn’t like the back arrow for exiting the document because they weren’t confident their work was being saved. Another 10% indicated that they expected an exit point for rearranging ideas (either a checkmark or a save option).
10% of users said that they didn’t like the “Delete” button being located at the top of the export menu, as they said it was unlikely they would want to delete a document and they were worried about clicking on it by accident instead of the export button.
In order to increase user confidence when making changes to their document, I made the following revisions to the docs screen:
I swapped the delete and export options so that the primary action (exporting) is on the top and the secondary action (deleting the document) is on the bottom.
With valuable user feedback incorporated, the MVP of Jot was complete. A mobile app to help writers capture their ideas, organize them, and then expand them into writing that they can easily share with the world.
Testers ran into some prototype issues during usability testing that made it difficult to gather feedback about one of the flows I was testing. I didn’t have time to redo it, so I took it as a lesson learned to always test the test before deploying it!
As with any design, there were a ton of great ideas for potential features that had to be deprioritized in order to maintain the project schedule. As a next step, I would revisit that list and determine what features would be most important to add next to make the app feel more robust.
