Dynamic Scheduler is a real-time adjustable schedule that allows users to add items with varying and unique priority, availability, and expected times of completions. Dynamic Scheduler helps individuals optimize their daily activities, making it easier to stay organized and focused on what matters most. With an intuitive interface and customizable features, this app aims to enhance productivity and reduce the stress that comes with traditional scheduling methods. Throughout this phase, we focused on identifying our competitors to study any strengths and weaknesses they may have. With this, we can create our own potential users and any scenarios that need to be taken account for during the development of our software.
During this phase, we used two research methods in a consecutive order. We began with competitive analysis of other available softwares by rating them on the following categories: strengths, weaknesses, quality level (low to high), price/cost, and platform availability. We selected three separate products to investigate. By organizing aspects of different products this way, we can discover key areas of improvement and areas that we should follow. This also allowed us to start gathering ideas for our personas.
The next step was heuristic evaluation of a specific product. This evaluation involves identifying the main goals we want to achieve with the application: adding and deleting tasks/events, specifying time of day of an event, and having a visual calendar. We chose “Structured - Daily Planner” due to how quickly it can be accessed without going through an account creation process. The heuristics we evaluated will be listed under our findings along with our agreed ratings from a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent).
After performing a competitive analysis, our UX team found that the demographic of individuals who may benefit most from our dynamic scheduling app spans a wide range, including professionals, students, and parents who need to organize both their own schedules and those of their children or employees.
After performing a heuristic evaluation on “Structured - Daily Planner”, we found that the app is a comprehensive scheduling tool that meets all the needs we had in mind for our dynamic scheduler. Rather than focusing on improving its existing features, we intend to draw inspiration from its design and functionality to enhance our own app. In the categories of user control and freedom, consistency and standards, and error prevention, it ranked 10’s. For aesthetic and minimalist design and help and documentation, it ranked 9’s. For flexibility and efficiency of use and recognition, it ranked 8’s. With these scores, the UX team found that “Structured - Daily Planner” does an excellent job in every category including functionality as well as aesthetics.
Personas and scenarios allowed the UX team insight as to why customers would choose our dynamic scheduling app, helping us understand the features they would utilize and the usability factors that are crucial to their experience. This process supported findings from other analysis methods, highlighting that most of our users will use our app as a tool to prioritize their schedules effectively and accurately.
The insights gained from Phase 1 of building the Dynamic Scheduler highlight certain areas we can differentiate and improve the Dynamic Scheduler from its competitors. Our competitive analysis revealed that Dynamic Scheduler has a broad appeal to a diverse demographic of people who are at different stages of their lives, which includes professionals, students, parents, etc. These people often juggle multiple responsibilities and would benefit from tools that provide flexibility in managing their schedules. This highlights a solution the dynamic scheduler can provide to these people's busy lives as it will have features that allow for real-time task adjustments as well as cross-schedule management. By addressing these needs, the Dynamic Scheduler will be well-positioned to meet the demands of a wide range of individuals. Our findings from the heuristic evaluation revealed that our competitors were lacking in areas such as “recognition rather than recall”, “flexibility and efficiency of use”, and “Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors”. These findings show that by focusing on greater flexibility, better recall features, and enhanced help resources, the Dynamic Scheduler can offer a more complete and friendlier user experience compared to its competitors.
Our biggest caveat during this phase (and potentially the following phases) is having no access to actual user feedback. Most of our research stems from analyzing softwares of our competitors which allowed us to create personas or “potential users” along with scenarios that our software has to work with.