WIM
Productivity Application
User Experience
Branding
App Design
AI Utilization
Accessibility
APP CONTEXT
Wim is a mobile application for a lockscreen/home screen widget system that features a customizable digital pal, themed visual sets, and various widgets used for mental clarity and mental health management. The app provides gentle motivation, structured focus, and mental health aid right from your phone's most visible screen.
Research
Problem Identification and User Insight
In a technology-driven environment saturated with productivity applications, users within an academic setting were interviewed to better understand the challenges they face around motivation and productivity. While many existing tools emphasize task completion and efficiency, they often fail to address the emotional and cognitive barriers that prevent users from getting started or staying engaged.
Many participants reported feeling unmotivated due to anxiety, overwhelm, and difficulty initiating tasks—especially when faced with large workloads or unclear priorities. These feelings often led to procrastination, avoidance, and guilt, further disrupting their ability to remain productive.
Several users also highlighted that these challenges were closely tied to neurodivergent traits such as executive dysfunction, difficulty with focus, and sensitivity to pressure. As a result, traditional productivity tools that rely on rigid structures or time-based pressure frequently exacerbated stress rather than supporting sustainable motivation. This insight revealed a need for a productivity solution that prioritizes flexibility, emotional support, and user-centered motivation over purely output-driven metrics.
Goal
Our goal is to reduce mental clutter and support daily self-management with various tasks to ease high stress or low-motivation moments.
This application was designed with an emphasis on accessibility for neurodivergent users.
Competitive Analysis
Through market research, we were able to look at previously existing productivity apps, and we identified their high points and problem areas. This gave us a lot of insight into what we could work on improving and implementing into our application design.
Momentum
Browser extension that replaces your tab with a clean focus dashboard featuring a daily prompt, to-do list, inspirational quote, background, and weather. It’s designed to minimize mindless browsing an encourage daily focus through motivational cues.
Pain Points
Free vs. premium limitations; privacy concerns; occasional bugs or crashes; some find imagery distracting.
Headspace
Mobile app that provides guided meditations, sleep sounds, and daily mindfulness exercises to support stress reduction and mental clarity. It includes features like mood check-ins and themed sessions, with short practices and calming cues that make it easy to use.
Pain Points
Users report cluttered navigation; feature overload; limited free content; high subscription costs; app performance issues; progress-tracking bugs; repetitive content; and lack of personalization.
Finch
A gamified self-care app where users build habits by caring for a virtual pet, alongside features like journaling and task tracking. Its cheerful animations, low-pressure design, and reflective tone make self-care feel more engaging
and consistent.
Pain Points
Subscription cost, hidden UI features, streak anxiety, confusion over navigation, and overwhelming colors.
Accessibility In Mind
With our key insights defined, we developed a user persona to represent our target audience.
This persona captures the needs, goals, and frustrations of typical users, helping guide our design decisions and ensure that our application addresses our user's pain points.
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Keep navigation simple and reduce clicks to avoid cognitive overload.
Use whitespace and chunk content into smaller, digestible pieces.
Allow users to adjust text size, color, and contrast to their needs.
Avoid overstimulating visuals and sounds; offer dark mode and soft color palettes.
Maintain consistent, structured layouts with clear instructions.
Limit animations and make them subtle, purposeful, and user-controllable.
User Persona
With our key insights defined, we developed a user persona to represent our target audience.
This persona captures the needs, goals, and frustrations of typical users, helping guide our design decisions and ensure that our application addresses our user's pain points.
User Story
"As an anxious young adult working a full-time job, I want to manage my daily tasks (both professional and personal) in a way that isn’t as stressful, but instead feels encouraging and positive, with features that motivate me to finish high-stress or difficult tasks that I often struggle to complete due to lack of motivation."
-Maya B.
Ideate
Applying AI Systems
At this point in the process, we have identified what features we would like our app to have. So, we then took a step back into research to identify what AI systems we would like to utilize and what role they play within our application.
Contextual AI: Learns patterns of user behavior across time of day, app usage, activity levels
Intent Prediction: Predicts what the user wants to do next based on their routine or pattern.
Recommender Systems: Suggests which task to work on and recommended project breakdowns into tasks when creating projects/tasks
Task Flow
We utilized a task flow to map out the interactions between our persona, Maya, and the application.
The task flow highlights how the app would influence her productivity, as well as monitoring her wellbeing and responding accordingly to benefit her the most, especially regarding her pain points (anxiety and feeling overwhelmed).
Design
Sketches and Mid-fi Wireframes
Hi-Fi Wireframes
Dashboard
A modular, widget-based dashboard is the landing page. Widgets are grouped by category and service for intuitive navigation, with bordered sections, ample white space, and multiple interaction types (tapping, dropdowns, vertical and horizontal scrolling). This structure reduces overstimulation and supports neurodivergent users.
Home Screen Widgets
Wim extends beyond the app with customizable iOS home screen widgets. This includes Encouraging "Lil Buddy", Up Next (quick task preview), and Relax/Breathe Break for stress relief.
Widget styles and background themes are fully customizable, allowing users to select calming visuals and colors that increase comfort and personalization.
Easy Planning
A calendar-style planning view displays tasks at a glance. A soft, purposeful color palette allows tasks to be color-coded by project without visual overload. Users can create tasks or projects from this page through a clear, structured input flow that breaks down required planning information.
Daily Check-ins
An optional daily check-in in the navigation bar allows users to log mood, stress, exhaustion, and goals without added pressure.
This lightweight reflection helps users recognize emotional patterns over time while enabling the app to offer personalized nudges, such as breathing exercises during high stress, rest reminders during exhaustion, or goal support during high motivation.
Lock Screen Notifications
Wim uses lock screen notifications to gently remind users of upcoming tasks or projects.
Notifications feature Lil Buddy as a visual cue for encouragement and emotional support, reinforcing that tasks can be approached positively using available tools.
Supportive Companion
"Lil Buddy" is an animated digital companion designed to provide comfort, motivation, and emotional support. Users can choose from themed character sets for personalization.
Through short, timely written nudges, Lil Buddy offers encouragement without overwhelming functionality, fostering consistency, focus, and a sense of companionship.
