Too much friction to start
Existing tools required setup, learning, and decisions before students could add the first task.
Noty · AI task management
Always with you.
Always ready.
A little support for everything on your mind.
Project at a glance · AI-Assisted Task Management
Plan less.
Start sooner.
A lightweight task-management experience that helps students capture tasks quickly, adapt their day, and use AI to turn large projects into doable steps.
40+students researched
70+interface screens
2testing rounds
3core task flows
- Team
- 3 product designers
- Timeline
- Spring 2026
- Focus
- Mobile interaction · AI role
- Methods
- Survey · Interviews · Usability testing
Overview
A task tool shaped around how students actually plan.
Reduce the effort of capturing, organizing, and restarting.
Students were already managing tasks across notebooks, calendars, reminders, apps, and memory. The problem was not a lack of tools—it was the effort required to keep those tools useful.
Noty brings fast capture, a today-focused plan, and AI-assisted project breakdown into one lightweight system designed to feel supportive rather than demanding.
My contribution
I contributed throughout the project and took a leading role in shaping the mobile interaction experience during the design phase.
As a team, we conducted research, synthesized findings, defined the shared feature set, and explored how the experience should adapt across platforms.
I translated those decisions into detailed mobile flows and prototypes, proposed drag-and-drop rescheduling, and focused on defining AI's role without removing user control.
Research
The issue was not remembering every task. It was maintaining a system.
40+students researched
121:1 interview participants
26group interview participants
70%had not found the right tool
We asked them
How does planning fit into real student life?
We looked beyond feature preferences to understand habits, abandonment, and the emotional experience of getting work done.
01
Which tools do you use?
02
How do you manage tasks today?
03
What makes you stop using a tool?
04
What keeps you motivated?
Out of sight, out of mind
Students had to remember to open the app, so important tasks disappeared until deadlines felt urgent.
No emotional reward
Digital completion lacked the visible, satisfying sense of crossing something off on paper.
Strategy / How Might We
How might we help students create, organize, and manage tasks with less effort and more clarity?
01
Capture
Record a task before the thought disappears.
02
Plan
Keep today visible and make changes easy.
03
Complete
Make progress tangible and satisfying.
04
Reflect
Help users adjust without framing unfinished work as failure.
Key features
Fewer steps between intention and action.
✦AI-assisted quick actions
＋Fast task creation
◉Today-focused view
✓Completion feedback
▦Project breakdown
Low-fidelity / Interaction exploration
Make the interaction work before refining the interface.
60+ sketches·Mobile app · Widget · Desktop shortcut
From ideas to connected flows
Across 60+ sketches and wireframes for three formats, we explored how students would enter tasks, review dates, move between daily work and projects, and respond to AI suggestions. I focused on connecting these decisions into the mobile interaction flows.
What we needed to check
- Can users find the right entry point and understand the information needed to create a task?
- Can they review voice input and AI-generated subtasks before committing to a plan?
- Does the calendar make tasks and project deadlines understandable together?
These wireframes made the interactions available for usability testing. The findings and resulting changes are shown in Testing & Iteration below.
Core flows
Seventy screens, compressed into three decisions that matter.
01
Capture before it disappears
Evidence
Students moved between paper, calendars, notes, and memory. The longer the setup, the more likely a task was lost.
Decision
Support manual, voice, and photo input across the mobile app, widget, and desktop shortcut.
Result
A user can capture first and organize later, without committing to one planning habit.
02
Replan without rebuilding the day
Evidence
Students wanted to reschedule directly from the to-do view when a plan changed.
Decision
Keep the interface centered on Today and use drag-and-drop to move unfinished work to another day.
Result
Rescheduling becomes a direct manipulation instead of another form to complete.
03
Let AI create a starting point
Evidence
Large projects felt vague, oversized, and difficult to begin.
Decision
Use AI to suggest subtasks, while letting users accept, reject, edit, or add their own steps before saving.
Result
AI reduces blank-page pressure without deciding the plan for the user.
AI principle
AI proposes.
The user decides.
Interactive prototype
Try Noty
Explore how Noty helps you capture a task, break down a project, and adjust your day.
Open prototype (opens in a new tab)
Testing & iteration
Two rounds turned usability findings into interaction changes.
Test tasks
- 01Create a new task
- 02Create a new event
- 03Reschedule a task
User testing · Round 01
Baseline usability test
8students
63.4SUS score
50%would recommend
User testing · Round 02
Validation after iteration
8students
82.5SUS score
90%would recommend
Finding → change
Faster project recognition
Before
Students could not quickly distinguish previously created projects.
After
Replaced the ambiguous trophy with a folder icon, making projects faster to recognize.
Finding → change
A timeline at a glance
Before
Tasks, deadlines, and subtasks were difficult to understand together in the calendar.
After
Added a project filter and visible date range so students can read each project’s timeline at a glance.
Finding → change
Task rescheduling
Before
Changing a task date required opening task controls from the list.
After
Enabled direct drag-and-drop from the home screen, so students can move work to a new day in one action.
Working metric: the 90% recommendation figure is retained from the final presentation and will be updated when the original calculation is confirmed.
Reflection
Keep it lightweight. Make every feature earn its place.
What I would keep
Noty’s strength is its lightweight focus: quick capture and direct rescheduling offer timely support without asking students to maintain another complex system.
What I would question
Does weekly feedback help students make better decisions, or add more information to process? I would test its value before assuming it belongs in the experience.
If I started again
I would validate the core flow in everyday student routines earlier, then use the findings to decide what to keep, simplify, or remove—not simply what to add.
What I would test next
- Everyday value. Observe use over several weeks: do students return, start tasks, and recover when plans change?
- Weekly feedback. Compare no summary, on-demand feedback, and a weekly prompt. Does any lead to useful action?
- AI effort. Compare manual planning with reviewing AI suggestions. Does AI reduce the total work?
- Cross-platform needs. Learn when mobile, widget, and desktop entry points are useful before expanding them.