To-do lists everywhere are causing an epidemic of stress and fear. Written ones get lost, aren’t easily editable and lack an inviting UI. Many apps have come on the market to solve this, yet they only seem to have made things worse through their clunky and over complicated interfaces. As an obsessive organizer, I lusted over the idea of a perfect app that I didn’t dread opening.

Zone is a productivity app for those that crave simplicity and beauty in their interfaces. It has 3 main sections: To-do’s, Appointments, and Projects. It does not attempt to wash your house too. Overly cluttered interfaces that offer a myriad of hyper-specific features are certainly attractive to users that are willing to put in the effort to learn the in’s and out’s of an app. However, the user that wants something easy and fast has their needs unmet in today's current market. This app is for them.

Before designing, or even finalizing the concept, it was important to gain a deeper understanding of the productivity app market and potential users. I started by creating personas, competitive analysis and user interviews to illuminate the direction this app should go to be successful.

The brand centers around simplicity and removing the stress associated with busy schedules. This helped inform the decision to pick a sunrise/set-like color pallet which evokes a peaceful feeling for most. The clean, san-serif typography continues along this same path as well as the roundedness of the components.

If my experience in product design has taught me one thing it’s that anything novel needs to be tested with users before deployment. There will almost certainly be something in the app that confuses users that I, as its creator, have a blind spot to. I’d like to get this in front of some test users to identify those cases before finalizing.