TL;DR
This writing is my personal retrospective of Companion. Companion was ideated, designed, and developed by me. I had a team, but the function of team presence was only as support, not for developing Companion with me.
At that time, I was challenged to helped a user with specific characteristics: chronic procrastinator. This is very common, actually. Some people tried as hard as they could just to avoid things they should’ve been doing. Their hobby is to delay everything, from biggest scale of it, even for smallest things like: delaying their own deadlines, procrastinate drinking in the morning and end up not drinking in a day, procrastinating to work, to take a bath, to get some sleep, to everything.
I have a month to work for the solution.
I conducted interviews, listened to our user, tried to understand the “why” he procrastinates everything, and the more I tried to understand, the more I know that procrastination is something that really complex because it might involve serious mental problem. Procrastination might not be solved only by things like a simple to-do list and time blocking. It also can’t be solved only by “self punishment” like doing app uninstallation and reinstall it back and forth, activate-deactivate-reactivate social media account, or freezing phone screen just to make the user not doing doomscrolling.
And the problem is: I only had a month to find the solution. I got to do the ideation, the designing process, and also the development. Since this was my first challenge in the academy, I was aware that I had enough expertise to find grande solution for procrastination problem :’)
I realized that the possible solution to the problem of chronic procrastination might not be an app itself, but rather support and connection with other people. I personally relate to the problem faced by the users I interviewed, and it reminded me of a time when I went through a difficult phase where I struggled to do everything on my own, finding it hard to stay motivated to fulfill my responsibilities. Let alone responsibilities— even hobbies and activities I usually enjoyed no longer felt enjoyable, let alone the daily duties and obligations. There was simply no motivation or enough drive to do any of it.
At that time, what helped me move forward was the support and presence of others. That’s why I came up with the idea: to bring support and presence of others into the app. Users can spend one focus session with anyone, anywhere, alongside people they meet through the app, but with a clear goal: to get things done during that session. Fortunately, there are no limitations for this project, aside from the deadline.
I tried explaining this idea of mine to a few people who are more experienced than I am. I received feedback that perhaps the idea I chose is too complex and would definitely require more than one user to test it out. Then, the security level is quite concerning—because just imagine—this app is like Tinder but for productivity. There’s no guarantee that the people on the app truly have good intentions, and there’s also no guarantee that each user’s meeting would actually end up being productive as I initially envisioned. There’s a potential security issue here.
On top of that, there’s another concern: should there be a selection of users based on their preferences? Would users want to spend the “session” through a video call, or a voice call? Or meet in person? If in person, where? Who could they meet? What categories of users would they be able to encounter? Should the focus be on proximity, or on working in the same field? Or at least… having similar interests? Or should there be swipe-right/swipe-left features like Tinder
Exhausting.
All the feedback I received pointed out that this app might be too complicated for me to build alone, even though the idea (so far) might be a (fairly) viable solution.
Of course, even without receiving any feedback, I had already thought about the limitations and weaknesses of this idea—especially if it’s realized as an app—but still, I take in and process all the feedback I’ve gotten.
Unfortunately, at that time I wasn’t confident enough to believe in my own idea. I felt like I was too much of a beginner (even though I actually wasn’t) and not brave enough to work on something that was considered “complicated.” In the second week, I ended up “putting aside” my idea for a while and decided to go with another, more common one.
I came up with an idea to make a Tamagotchi-based to-do list app. You could say I “moved on” from my original idea and shifted to this Tamagotchi-like one because I thought it would be easier and would minimize people’s comments, since the app features wouldn’t be too complex. I started ignoring the reasons why I wanted to create the app in the first place and instead shifted my focus to “as long as it gets done by the deadline.” I stopped questioning everything that was needed because I was afraid of wasting time. I was afraid that the solution I had wouldn’t be seen as “solution enough” in other people’s eyes.