Smarty unifies task management & calendar scheduling into one clean application powered by AI.
Principle product designer, creating the core interface for Smarty. Working closely with the CEO and engineering team, conducted user research and synthesized analysis into validated value propositions, created the foundational product app interface, as well as provided design strategy for the product roadmap. Smarty AI is still in active development.
Skills:
Product Design & Strategy
UX Research
Interface design
Product:
Personal productivity application
Industry:
AI/Natural Language Processing
Task management
Calendar scheduling
Smarty is an AI-powered personal productivity tool, built on top of an NLP (natural language processing) interface and artificial intelligence engine. With the goal to let users enter free form text which Smarty automatically recognizes by keywords and generatively schedules: to create tasks, events, and convert emails into action items.
Our target personas were identified as executive assistants and other professionals overwhelmed with scheduling obligations. From there we created persona profiles, user journey maps, as well as conducted rounds of user interviews. In our interviews we focused on how people organize & structure their schedule over the course of week, and what were their pain points & goals when planning out objectives for their calendar.
A pain point map was created to visualize the flow of how users planned & scheduled with their existing tools & workflows. Tracking their actions, feelings & questions, as well as points of friction that could be leveraged into opportunities in each step of their flow.
After conducting rounds of user interviews and discovery, we summarized 3 different possible value propositions for our initial feature set & the core design principles, and organized our findings synthesized into a Jobs to Be Done statement:
"When I’m newly overwhelmed by an overflowing plate and the meetings/tasks keep coming, I want to easily track my workload (via smart visualization and automatic re-prioritization), so I can have mental clarity and confidence each day."
• Task tracking & management
• Automated scheduling
• Integrations
Based on our insights from user research & market analysis, and supported by an examination of existing systems & methodologies, Smarty's UI was redesigned on top of a natural language processing engine with AI auto-scheduling that will schedule tasks & events based on priority. The app UI was designed to let users build content through a clean textual interface, allowing users to conversationally create tasks/events and schedule them.
• Simplicity & transparency
• A clean/minimal interface
• Easy to maintain
Informed by our research findings & user feedback, a new app interface was designed focused on the core principles of "simplicity & transparency" and "a clean/minimal interface". Additionally, from our research we learned that our target users wanted to be able to quickly jot down tasks or events at hand (without needing to fill out a time-consuming form) and have the product recognize parameters from keywords.
• Powered by natural language
• Automated scheduling
• A clean/focused UI
Users can visually compare their calendar view to a textual list layout to see how any given day is structured, and drag/drop between the two interfaces. In addition to the command menu to textually organize & schedule, user can also create content & visualize organization of their tasks & events via the textual list panel or the default calendar interface.
Additionally, user can toggle between the views; with list view as the main interface and the calendar as a panel for visual comparison.
A powerful feature requested from users during testing & interviews, was to create follow-up tasks & events based on emails. With an integration to GMail, users can view their email inbox in comparison to their schedule, and easily create tasks or events that reference back to the email trigger.
To aid in design/dev efficiency, I built a reusable modular component library based on atomic design principles to establish a scalable design system.
This allowed Smarty to maintain branded consistency as new features are being developed.
Smarty is still in active development, but based on prototype testing with users there is active interest in the product's email to task/event creation integration as well as resounding preference for the purely textual NLP driven UI to easily create & edit scheduling content without having to engage with multiple click-through behaviors with the previous form-heavy interface.