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:
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.
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.