edlyft on track

Project Timeline

5 months

Tasks

User research
Research analysis & synthesis
Wire-framing
Iterating design solutions
Rebrand and redesign
Prototyping
Cross platform interaction (mobile & web)
User testing
Production testing

Collaborators

Erika Hairston, Co-Founder
Thomas L'anglais, Senior Software Engineer

Edlyft was on a mission to support underrepresented, computer science students land internships at blue chip companies, such as Netflix, Dropbox, and Google.

In our search for product market fit, we developed multiple products to support our students (users), including Edlyft on Track, a task tracker to stay on top of all things school and career. Our process was driven through ensuring students were at the forefront of everything we created. User research drove our product roadmap.

While working on Edlyft On Track, we encountered challenging user pain points that, through creative design solutions, led to exponential growth.

Draft of digital affinity map. The post-its are color coded, one for each user, and clustered together based on similarities in context of an observation or a quote from the user. Made with FigJam.

the research

I conducted 8 semi-structured interviews with users who voluntarily participated in the research. We ensured to even out the number of inactive and active users based on the total amount of tasks they had added to Edlyft on Track

The Goals

‍Increase growth in key metrics
1. Completed tasks
2. Added/edited tasks
3. Total weekly active users who have added ≥5 tasks

Understand thoughts and behaviors while starting tasks, breaking down tasks, and making progress on tasks

Overarching Question

How do students breakdown working on a task and how do they track progress for multiple tasks?

Research Questions

How much time do you give yourself to work on different tasks?
Could you talk about the timeline of your most recent completed assignment, starting from when it was assigned to when it was turned in?
How do you prioritize your tasks? What’s most important? Why?
How do you prefer viewing all of your tasks at once?
Let’s say that you have made some progress on a particular task, how would you expect to show that on said task?

Users would like to visually associate time to their tasks

RESEARCH FINDINGS‍

‍Users prioritize career prep tasks and classwork based on due dates
‍In order to visually associate time to their tasks, users would manually type in due dates into the task itself
One user stated, "It would be nice to see how all the tasks land date wise based on when they are due.”

SOLUTIONS

To align with our findings, I added optional due and start dates to tasks.
Additionally, I emphasized the Today column through size assisting the user in focusing on their current workload.

CHALLENGES

‍‍Setting similar functional behavior in 3 different types of views — Board, Calendar, and Agenda — to the due date
In Board View (Home), the due date is highlighted in a bright blue pill for increased visual prominence.
In Calendar and Agenda View, tasks with a due date were placed under the respective day, while tasks without due dates are placed under the day they were created

Users can also set start dates (3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks) to shift tasks accordingly to when the user should start the task, promoting proactive planning

For instance, setting a start date on a task that is due May 5 to 3 days moves the task to the Today column on May 2

Users can set start dates (3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks) to shift tasks accordingly to when the user should start the task, promoting proactive planning.

Users tend to breakdown tasks over multiple days

RESEARCH FINDINGS‍

Users would create duplicate tasks in all three columns to work on one particular task over a course of few days, but did not like having to do doing that‍
Users mostly focused on a single task over several days, often breaking it down into smaller subtasks

SOLUTIONS

We introduced a manual progress bar for tasks with selected due and start dates
Users easily adjust it to reflect their completion percentage, ensuring flexibility across various workflows, eliminating the need to break down tasks
To ensure accountability of users starting their tasks when intended, if progress has not been made on a task on the day of the start date, the progress bar turns red

CHALLENGES

‍Solving for how users would understand how the feature functions
Tooltips on the next login informed users of new features, and motivational tooltips appeared as features were used

the results

Over the course of the research and implementation of new features, we saw a significant increase in product engagement. The number of tasks that were added/edited increased by over 11x and the number of tasks completed increased by over 14x

Our total amount of users signed up grew from 0 to 1,588 within 5 months and our number of active users (users who have added/edited ≥5 tasks) also increased by 340%