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Gamifying the Note Pad/To Do List
Recently we launched a new to do list app called Goalie, and we’ve got to be honest: we think Goalie is pretty special.
Why do we think that Goalie is one of the best to do list apps out there?
While Goalie sits among stiff competition with the likes of Any.Do, Evernote and Apple Reminders (in addition to the classic notepad), we think Goalie fits a user niche not yet tackled.
What makes Goalie special isn’t the sheer number of hours it took to build Goalie. Goalie has a minimal UX that ended up taking us only a few week from start to finish.
It isn’t the integrations, multi-level hierarchy, ability to collaborate on tasks or the use of 3D touch (yet) either.
We think what makes our new to do list app special is how it combines simplicity with gamification.
Before diving into our final approach, we should touch on our first (fast failed) idea. Goalie began as a “build a polished app in a week” challenge for our development team that not only was a good test of our capabilities, but also helped our development team learn more about the UX process by actually owning for a change. Our idea was to create a goal planner tool, helping users plan out due dates for life goals and accomplish them by breaking them down into sub-goals and assigning those sub goals to a today/tomorrow view in order to mark them off, one-by-one. In retrospect, we admit that sounds a little complex.
While we did manage to complete the app within the week, we received feedback from our users that made it clear that we had to pivot if we wanted to launch a successful to do list app. After listening to the excellent critical feedback our designer came up with, we decided to change direction and start anew. Read more about how our designer, Sam came up with the idea for Goalie 2.0 on her blog and learn about how our lead developer, Greg was able to successfully make the pivot from Goalie 1.0 to 2.0 without losing much in the way of time in an earlier Incipia post.
