TOCK
Overview
TOCK is a concept for a free, no-frills, ad-supported web application for tracking work hours and expenses. It’s geared at both freelancers and small to large businesses.
The Challenge
To create a simple, feature-slim, time and expenses tracking application. This included creating personas, branding, and screens.
Our high-level goals were to:
- Create a brand identity for the application
- Perform user research and create user personas
- Demonstrate the basic functionality by creating a clickable prototype in InVision to show to potential investors
Audience
Small to large businesses as well as gig-economy workers that don’t want to invest too much in a program with unnecessary bells and whistles that go unused.
My Role
As the sole UX Designer, I worked closely with my client to understand the most basic needs of the application and which user flows would be best to demonstrate to potential investors. Since the application needed some kind of branding I also created a basic brand identity.
Scope and Constraints
For this project, we wanted to create branding as well as demonstrate the main functions of the application as economically as possible. With a two week turnaround time and some very basic wireframes provided by the client my task was to:
- Compare similar (paid) apps
- Perform user interviews
- Create user personas
- Create branding including logo and style guide
- Design two user flows, one for admins and one for employees (Desktop)
- Design custom mock ads to use in the prototype
- Create a clickable prototype in InVision for both user flows
Process
To start I was provided with some basic wireframes showcasing the information that the prototype would need to demonstrate as well as some market insights from the client based on conversations with business colleagues (aka future users of the product).
I began my research by looking at and comparing the top similar applications:
All three applications include a free trial but no free tier beyond that. This reinforced the hunch that there’s a need for such an application. I then chose 3 business owners to interview and see is this a gap in the market that needs to be filled? Here are my top takeaways from the user interviews:
- Small business owners find themselves spending far too much time on administration duties
- Consolidating all costs per project can be a nightmare
- A lot of effort goes into chasing after clients with unpaid invoices
- Having to cross-reference timesheets is time-consuming and leaves room for error
- The underlying danger of cost-leakage due to human error
- Existing applications have too many features and the monthly cost adds up!
Based on the interviews and client insights I created two personas to represent the two different users who would be likely to use the product:
With our defined users in mind, the client provided wireframes, and a good grasp of the competition I put together a brand identity:
I then began designing the screens making sure to focus on the simplicity it needed to encompass, both feature-wise and in the design itself. I also designed a number of banner ads as the application would be ad-supported.
Results
The result is a very clean, no-frills interface with custom branding turned into a clickable prototype in InVision including custom ad mockups to demonstrate to potential investors.
