HarusFocus | Joseph Wijaya

Role: UI/UX Designer
Type: Project
Platform: iOS
Year: 2024

TheProblem

The tools meant to protect focus were the same ones breaking it. Christopher already had timers, alarms and the phone's own focus mode, and still lost the day: none of them held a reason to stay on task once the first notification arrived.

Working from home removes the structure an office imposes, so the hours exist but nothing marks them, and effort went unrecognised, since a day of real work ended with no more evidence of it than a day of none.

TheSolution

Give the working day a shape the user chooses, and make holding it feel worth doing: a session that starts in one tap when there is no time to plan and carries a full schedule when there is, with every session tied to a stated goal so the reason to stay survives the first interruption.

Block what interrupts, notifications and applications, with exceptions the user picks rather than a blanket, build the break into the session rather than leaving it to willpower, and mark every completed step so progress is visible while it happens.

TheProcess

Design

The persona Christopher with his goal and frustration, above the pain points and how might we boards

Step 01

Brief

The findings narrowed to one person, one goal and one frustration, so everything after had a single thing to be measured against.

Pain points
User persona
Goal statement

The empathy map from the interview: says, thinks, does and feels, with the persona's facts as chips

Step 02

Research

Interviews with people who work from home, written up as an empathy map: what they say, think, do and feel about a working day they are trying to hold together.

Interviews
Empathy map
Persona

Step 03

Ideation

A journey map and How Might We statements, clustered on an affinity diagram and prioritised into five themes the product had to cover: setting up, keeping focus, keeping going, the short escape, and feeling proud of it.

User journey
How Might We
Affinity diagram
Prioritisation

Step 04

Design system

Type, colour, iconography, components and a grid settled before the screens were dressed, so the UI was assembly rather than a second round of decisions.

Manrope, 7 sizes
7 colours
16 icons
1 column, 6 rows

Step 05

User flow

The two ways in, a quick focus for when there is no time to plan and a scheduled focus for when there is, drawn as one flow from onboarding through to the appreciation screen at the end.

Two entry points
Reminder loop
Appreciation at the end

Four of the seventeen screens: home, quick focus, setting up and focus mode

Step 06

UI design

Seventeen screens, laid out from the prioritised solutions rather than from a blank canvas, so each one answered something the research had already asked for.