UCLA UX Design Course

Project: iOS Clock App Redesign

Date: Jan. 2025 - March 2025

Role: UX/UI Design, UX Research, usability testing, prototyping

Undo it, see my process

As part of a 6-person UX design team, I worked on redesigning key features of the iOS Clock app to better support users' daily routines, and reinforce Apples business goals. Our goal was to make alarms and timers easier to manage, more customizable, and less cognitively demanding.

We conducted user interviews, built affinity maps, and identified pain points in the current app experience. From there, we designed high-fidelity prototypes and performed usability testing to evaluate whether our solutions made managing time simpler and more intuitive.

Final Prototype

How We Got There?

Apples' Business Goals

Research Goals

After analyzing Apple’s interviews, articles, and presentations, we identified five key goals the company consistently strives toward:
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- Enhance users’ lives
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- Bring people together
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- Maintain a seamless ecosystem
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- Drive innovation
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- Deliver simple, intuitive user experiences

In what situations do users rely on the iOS Clock App?
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How do users react to the features on a daily?
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What are the primary frustrations users have?
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How can the clock app help users manage their time more effectively?

How
Did We
Answer
These?

EMPATHIZE

From 10 User Interviews of Students at UCLA we created a persona of what a potential user would look like.

User Persona:

Name: Alex Smith
Age: 20
Income: ~$11,000
Location: Los Angeles, CA

Hobbies & Interests:
Passionate about developing small apps.

Enjoys working out at the campus gym.

Unwinds with a good book, podcast, or new cooking recipe.

Experiences/Usage:
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Balances being a student, a teachers assistant, working out, and personal coding projects.

Sets at least five alarms daily: one to wake up, others for classes, work shifts, and task reminders.

Uses the timer feature frequently for study sessions, grading homework, and workouts.

Finds the interface difficult to manage multiple alarms.

Wishes alarms could be categorized and personalized by day (his schedule is varied).

Affinity Diagram

We then created an Affinity Diagram and did Root Cause Analysis Chart to understand where common challenges lie.

Root Cause Analysis

DEFINE

Challenges:

Daily Routines and Time Management:
- User needs vary for different tasks, such as requiring precise scheduling for repeated wake-up alarms, or requiring more ease of use for flexible time-based activities such as cooking or studying.
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Organization:
- Users find it tedious to delete alarms and timers one by one, and desire a feature for more sensitive organization of alarms.
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Flexibility and Customization:
- Users want to be able to easily edit and customize timers to their liking based on their recurring activities, such as creating “Pomodoro” presets for studying.
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IDEATE

Design Goals:

Timers need to allow for categorization, mass deletion, and time adjustment.
Alarms need to allow for categorization and mass deletions as well.
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Each of these features addresses key user needs:
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- Categorization helps users organize tasks, customize timers for different activities, and build consistent routines they can reuse daily.
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- Mass deletion allows users to stay organized by easily clearing outdated or unused items.
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- Time adjustment gives users flexibility to quickly add or reduce time during an activity.
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Lo-fidelity Prototypes:

PROTOTYPE

Solutions:

Timers now allow for categorization, mass delition and extending/reducing duration.
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Alarms also now allow for categorization and mass deletions
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High-fidelity Prototypes:

Design Dilemmas

Timer:

What if users are not used to being able to interact with the timer wheel?
We created two versions of the timer tool to account for this unfamiliar interaction: one with a timer wheel, and one that is a lo-fi prototype with +/- buttons for adjusting time.
This serves to simplify the interactions with the app.

Solutions:

TEST

We conducted usability tests with 6 users at UCLA that match our persona.

Timers:
- Users successfully navigated the new categorization and mass deletion features, describing them as useful and intuitive.
- However, they preferred the time adjustment tool with +/- signs, finding the drag-based timer wheel unintuitive.

Alarms:
- Similarly, users found the categorization and mass deletion features helpful and easy to use.
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Overall: Users responded positively to the new additions, with a clear preference for the more straightforward and familiar interaction designs.
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