Shai Pal | Portfolio

DAILY PLANNER

Circa 2018

Background: With over 40 million users worldwide, Any.do is one of the top productivity tools in the world. I lead the design there between 2016 and 2019.
Any.do’s daily planner feature, called Moment, is a big differentiator when it comes to tasks management apps. It was a good product but far from perfect. With data from the first iteration and user feedback, we’ve started to build Moment 2.0 from the ground up.

WHAT DID WE TRY TO SOLVE?

THE CHALLANGE

Increase engagement with the daily planner from a few times a month to a few times a week.

Increase revenue. Moment is a freemium feature (limited to 5 times a month), making it a vital feature for users will convince them to become paying customers.

MY ROLE

End to end design:  research, wire-framing, design, prototyping, and usability. Yep, all of it.

Platform: iOS & Android

TL;DR

‘Moment 2.0’ produced numbers that were a bit better than ‘Moment 1’, but not significantly better.

Higher retention rate among calendar oriented users. No improvement over Task-oriented users.

Background: Released in 2013, Any.do 'Moment' was aimed to increase productivity & engagement among our customers by allowing them to review their tasks for today and then decide if they would like to tackle it now, later or whenever:

Feedback from V1 of Any.do Moment was fairly positive. It was a fresh attempt to address a known problem, baked within the Any.do minimalistic design language.

But there were problems we found in our research leading to V2, these were the main ones:

1. Data showed customers interacted with Moment a few times a month. The main goal of this next iteration was to increase engagement to a level of a few times per week.

2. Customers had no idea what they have scheduled in their day when they postpone tasks for later.

3. Customers had to make a decision regarding all of their tasks, they couldn’t just skip a task they were not interested in tackling.

4. Customers who used the app to jot up just about anything saw they needed to make decisions regarding tomatoes and onions in their shopping list.

5. The interface didn’t support more than 30 tasks & was designed for 4-inch screens. It didn’t utilize the big canvas larger phones offer today.

6. With all the fireworks & animations, the interface was pretty slow, and you needed a good 3–4 seconds until you can actually interact with the product.

Feedback from V1 of Any.do Moment was fairly positive. It was a fresh attempt to address a known problem, baked within the Any.do minimalistic design language.

But there were problems we found in our research leading to V2, these were the main ones:

1. Data showed customers interacted with Moment a few times a month. The main goal of this next iteration was to increase engagement to a level of a few times per week.

2. Customers had no idea what they have scheduled in their day when they postpone tasks for later.

3. Customers had to make a decision regarding all of their tasks, they couldn’t just skip a task they were not interested in tackling .

4. Customers who used the app to jot up just about anything saw they needed to make decisions regarding tomatoes and onions in their shopping list.

5. The interface didn’t support more than 30 tasks & was designed for 4-inch screens. It didn’t utilize the big canvas larger phones offer today.

6. With all the fireworks & animations, the interface was pretty slow, and you needed a good 3–4 seconds until you can actually interact with the product.


Following the feedback + success of Any.do’s calendar tab (shown above) which allowed customers to view their tasks inside their calendar, we decided to integrate it into our redesign and implement the rest of the feedback we got from our customers.

We addressed the main issues. Customers had the ability to scan their backlog of tasks and magically drag and drop their tasks within their daily agenda for the perfect A-HA moment. They also had the ability to adjust the timeframe required for a specific task — another A-HA moment.

But data showed Moment 2.0 was a failure. It wasn’t a catastrophic failure: The numbers were pretty on par with Moment 1. Even better: customers who had calendar events were better engaged with Moment 2 compared to Moment 1. But from an analytical point of view — it just didn’t perform significantly better.

So what went wrong? The first rule of building a valuable product is that it should be valuable for someone. Moment 2 did that, but the main problem was the majority of our user base didn’t have many events in their daily agenda or weren’t calendar oriented at all.

Thus, 70% of the canvas was pretty irrelevant to them. Dragging and dropping tasks in your agenda is awesome, but dragging them between your busy day is far better and rewarding. Many users missed that golden feeling.

Moment 2 also featured bugs that I felt were harming the core experience, but when deciding what’s next on our plate, we decided not to invest further into fixes that can increase numbers by a little but won’t change the big picture.

I have been designing digital products for many years. Luckily for me, most of them succeeded tremendously. But some of them did fail. For whatever reason, I was emotionally attached to this feature, and it wasn’t even the main product. It’s one of those products that get you really excited about, and that’s one of the essences of our profession.

Learning from failures is a critical aspect of product design. Moment 2 on mobile was buried, but it returned in a different form factor, this time on the large canvas of the web.

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