Timeframe: 4 months (May-August 2024)
Team: Shrey Baranga (me), Alice Liu
My Role: UX Researcher and UX/UI Designer
Tools: FigJam, Miro, Figma, Stark, Material Design System, iOS/Apple Design System
Some key quotes from our interviews:
Miro board affinity map
Click on this link to access our Miro board! This contains our affinity and empathy maps, as well as our initial user flows.
Key pain points for consideration:
Pain points from user interviews
Highly motivated internally, easily sets and achieves goals.
Motivated both internally and externally, usually achieves goals but can feel discouraged along the way.
Motivated internally and externally but struggles with goal setting and achievement, thriving when supported or working alongside others.
Finally, we translated our empathy maps into three fully developed personas that represented our core user groups. These personas guided design decisions throughout the rest of the project, ensuring our solutions addressed specific motivations, frustrations, and needs.
Initial user flows
After sketching mockups through a modified version of the Crazy 8s method, our team discussed design guidelines to narrow down and consolidated ideas:
Users can track their daily in-progress goals by priority and time, and navigated across days with arrow controls.
When completing a goal, users can attach evidence by submitting a photo or adding a comment, with the option to include it in their weekly progress report.
Users can set goal details such as name, time, priority, reminders, and notes.
Goals can be filtered by status (in-progress, completed, and incomplete) and timeframe (all-time, last week, and last month).
Users verify their accountability partner's goal evidence at the end of the week.
Users can expand goals, view their partner's comments, and respond directly.
To validate our design, I conducted usability testing with 5 participants, who performed 6 core actions (e.g., creating a new goal, submitting evidence, messaging an accountability buddy). After task completion, participants shared their impressions and suggestions.
After usability testing, I discovered 3 major issues:
Based on usability testing findings, I made several significant changes:
To address these challenges, I redesigned the experience around an Activity Feed. This feature replaced the static weekly report with a more dynamic, continuous stream of updates. In the feed, users can:
Engage with multiple accountability partners, creating a stronger sense of community
View real-time progress updates instead of waiting for weekly summaries
Interact more frequently and flexibly through likes, comments, and check-ins.
By reframing accountability as an ongoing, interactive experience, the Activity Feed made it easier for users to stay engaged and fostered a deeper sense of support within their personal goal networks.
Problem: Verifying every goal became repetitive and demotivating.
Solution: Replaced "Verify/Reject Goals" with a Challenge Evidence button. Users now only intervene when evidence seems questionable, making interactions more meaningful and reducing cognitive load.
The original design required users to verify every single goal completed by their accountability partner. While this feature was intended to reinforce trust and accountability, usability testing revealed that it quickly became tedious and frustrating.
For users with partners who set many goals, the verification process felt like a chore, especially when goals were broad or abstract. Instead of fostering meaningful accountability, it risked reducing interactions to repetitive approval tasks. This undermined the opportunity for authentic engagement, where users could provide thoughtful support and feedback.
To streamline the process, I introduced a "Challenge Evidence" button in place of the dual "Reject" and "Verify" options. With this adjustment:
Users no longer need to verify every single goal, which significantly reduces unnecessary actions.
Attention shifts toward exception cases where evidence doesn't align with a stated goal.
Engagement becomes more intentional and meaningful, as users intervene only when something seems off.
Problem: Streaks created pressure and discouraged users who missed days.
Solution: Introduced a weekly calendar that highlights active days rather than penalizing breaks, paired with achievements as flexible, positive reinforcement.
To address this, I redesigned the system around a weekly activity calendar paired with achievement milestones:
The calendar emphasizes active days rather than unbroken streaks, creating a more flexible and forgiving experience.
Users gain recognition for consistency across a week, even if they miss occasional days.
Achievements provide varied and rewarding milestones, helping users celebrate progress in different ways beyond daily repetition.
This shift reframed motivation as positive reinforcement and flexibility, ensuring users could step away without being penalized, while still feeling proud of their progress.
1. Clearer icons: Simplified task actions (☑️ for completion, ✏️ for editing) for clarity.
2. Collapsible goals: Grouped by priority on the homepage for focus and scannability, allowing users to focus on what's important in the moment.
3. Completed goals section: Removed clutter by moving finished tasks to a separate view.
4. Accessibility fixes: Adjusted color contrast (e.g., black "+" icon on yellow background) to meet accessibility standards.
This project reinforced several key lessons about the UX design process:
🫂Prioritizing user centricity. Conducting interviews revealed struggles and blind spots we had not initially anticipated. By grounding our design decisions in user needs, we created a product that felt both relevant and genuinely useful.
🔁Embracing iteration. While our initial research informed the first design, subsequent usability testing was invaluable for refinement. Iteration helped us move from assumptions to a more intuitive, user-centered solution.
✅ Designing for accessibility. I relied on the Stark plug-in in Figma to evaluate contrast ratios. This process surfaced color issues that would have impacted users with color blindness, and adjusting these choices early ensured a more inclusive experience. Accessibility cannot be an afterthought, it needs to be embedded throughout the design process.
👥 The Value of Collaboration. Our team actively engaged across roles and held collaborative work sessions. This cross-pollination of ideas pushed our designs further than any one of us could have achieved alone.
With an additional iteration, I would conduct another round of usability testing on the current design, gather feedback, and refine the experience further. Continuous cycles of testing and iteration are where the most impactful improvements emerge.