(un)comfy potato – I think we all have times where we feel lazy like a couch potato but in order to achieve our goals, we have to be uncomfortable and step outside of our comfort zone. Hence, the name “uncomfy”. But I wanted a gentler habit tracker that would both be easy to use and also facilitate thoughtful and meaningful progress.

This is a project totally born from my particular needs and wants but in some future endeavors, I want to conduct more research into some of the main points of effective habit trackers.

1. Background
2. Concept
3. Low fidelity mocks
4. There’s still so much to do!

Background

A little bit about me, I am someone that doesn’t have a solid routine — I really just live my life day-to-day chaotically not knowing what I’m going to do WOOOO. This may seem very obvious, but habit trackers are mostly just for tracking habits (what a conclusion to reach). I notice that I like putting all of my plans together — my habits, my specific tasks for that day, meetings, etc. What’s been working for me currently is to use Google Calendar, where I schedule my tasks for the day rather than rely on tasks that occur regularly. But maybe that’s exactly what I need — to consistently do a single thing every day in order for it to become a habit and so that I don’t need to remind myself to do it anymore. That would be so great, wouldn’t it?

There are some habits that I would like to develop but there’s a lot of talk thrown around about it taking 10 weeks or 21 days to form a habit. What if you reach 10 weeks but you drop off from it for a few months — do you have to do 10 weeks again? What if you never reach 10 weeks? While I think being able to do something consistently for that long is a pretty good indication that it’s a habit, I think that it’s not enough of a solution and often sets people up for failure. Because it’s not simply just aiming for 10 weeks, you’d probably have to adjust some things in your life for you to do something for that long. And that’s why it really depends on the situation and the person, like this study using machine learning to get insight on habit formation concludes.

But if I were to make a general observation about habit formation, I’d break it down into 3 different phases with going to the gym as an example habit:

• Just do it once:
  • “I’ll just go to the gym today. I don’t even have to get a good workout in, just show up.”
• Now do it more than once
  • “I will go to the gym twice this week. Any day/time that I can go works.”
• Now include it into your routine
  • “I will go to the gym right before work on Mondays and Wednesdays.”
  • Include it in between things that you already know that you have to do — such as going to work, school, club, etc.

But these phases aren’t really linear — in fact I go back-and-forth between them a lot. I don’t think that the solution to change is a yet another app, but I wanted to explore a way that could make people feel less bad about not sticking to their habits and just being more observant of what is working/not working for them and adjusting accordingly. Because at the end of the day, there’s no full-proof, one-size-fits-all solution that helps everyone.

Concept

Observations from other productivity/habit trackers that I’ve tried

Right off the bat, I tried to think about the things that I liked and disliked from the apps that I’ve used as a habit tracker.

• Flora
  • This is great as a pomodoro timer as you are promised a plant once you’ve gone a certain amount of time without touching your phone. However, it didn’t give me that same motivation when reminding me to do my tasks. It would be interesting if they extended the plant-growing feature to the tasks, such as, if you had to wager one of your plants if you skipped a task for the day.
• Fabulous
  • I didn’t try this out for too long, because I found myself being overwhelmed by the interface; I prefer something much simpler and cleaner.
• Tangerine
  • From initial glance, this seems like the tracker most closest to what I want. It has a “Skipped” list, which is a feature that I propose below as marking certain tasks as “Incomplete”. I also like the simple interface and the ability to add notes and reflect on your tasks. It’s always tricky doing market research because then I lose confidence, like welp, what I wanted to build already exists BUT! I think that (un)comfy potato can have different, helpful functions.
  • Streak function: If you keep on completing a habit, you’ll be able to maintain your streak. I don’t see another incentive besides this but this is one of the things that I think Duolingo does very well. Maybe if there was a leaderboard built in, some sort of gift or premium feature unlocked for the longest streak, that would serve as an even stronger incentive.
• Honorable mention: Duolingo
  • I’m including this in the list as it really does make language-learning addictive and one of the founders explains just how they did it in this TedTalk. I think streaks, as I mentioned above, is a big part of it. And the algorithm used to predict when to send notifications too, is pretty clever. If you can do the same thing, at the same time every day, you get used to it and sooner or later you won’t even have to think about it to do it!

Low fidelity mocks

In the quick sketch above, I imagine the main character of the app — whom I call Mr. Po Tate — who would be there along with you in your specific habit journey. On the home screen, there would be an isometric 3D (perhaps Blender and Three.js rendered) room with Mr. Tate. I thought of gameifying the habit tracking by awarding points for every habit completed and in turn those points could be used to buy certain items to decorate the room with.

Next, onto the Calendar View mock.

• You can choose between 3 different views for viewing your tasks: Day, Week, and Month. On this Month view, colored dots on certain dates indicate those days where tasks were completed. And every task has the ability to be assigned to a different color dot. This could be a Category in the future, or may look differently but this is basically to help group certain tasks together.
• To the right below the calendar, there is a drop-down to filter between the specific task categories.
• And then under the Calendar is a list of Tasks for that specific view (Month) listed in chronological order. Each Task item would have the Task title, Task group, Task due date, and reason for completing this task.

And then finally, onto the Create Task View mock.

• This includes pretty standard fields that are seen in other habit trackers/calendar apps but I wanted to change the language around them a bit to facilitate a more meaningful way to use the space. Instead of “Description” or “Notes”, the empty space would say “Your why/how” instead, because sometimes you need a reminder of why you are trying to build a certain habit in the first place.
• Another field I want to highlight is the “Reward” field, as it’s important to celebrate yourself for completing the task and to make you want to continue to do it.
• Lastly, there would be a reflection space after the task is marked as complete or incomplete. Marking a task as incomplete I think is a necessary feature for good habit trackers because things don’t go the way you expect sometimes, but that’s okay! I think we should acknowledge that and if there’s anything that could be changed next time so that you actually complete the task.

There’s still so much to do!

Of course, this is a still in its rough stages, so there’s a LOT more that I will need to do before it’s ready for testing.

• My next steps include putting together high-fidelity mocks that showcase the theme and feel of the app
• Building out a prototype
• I also want to conduct more market and user research on areas such as:
  • How to display progress in a meaningful way — graphs, charts, etc.
  • More ways to facilitate goal progress
• Future features
  • Pomodoro function — can use the app not only as a tracker

If you have any questions, ideas, feedback, etc. about this, would love to hear them!