WHAT IF — Productivity and Task-Management
WHAT IF is a productivity and task-management app that motivates its users to accomplish goals by capitalising on the anxieties of modern-day living and turning them into fear-based incentives.
The brand is an embodiment of the harsh inner critic that results from equating our worth with our productivity. It serves as a critique on the increasing prevalence of productivity tools that reflect our lives back to us through a fun-house mirror of recorded data and incomplete daily tasks marked 'urgent' or 'two days late'.
The brand is an embodiment of the harsh inner critic that results from equating our worth with our productivity. It serves as a critique on the increasing prevalence of productivity tools that reflect our lives back to us through a fun-house mirror of recorded data and incomplete daily tasks marked 'urgent' or 'two days late'.
This is a fictional brand designed as part of a university project to comment on the social issues being contributed to by the growing presence and UX design of productivity tools within the self-improvement industry.
Self-criticism has been shown to preoccupy us with failure, negatively impacting our self-image and contributing to symptoms of depression, anxiety and cognitive distortion.
Self-criticism has been shown to preoccupy us with failure, negatively impacting our self-image and contributing to symptoms of depression, anxiety and cognitive distortion.
While there exist genuinely helpful productivity and task-management tools that are positive examples of how technology improves the way we work, there is also a growing pressure to quantify our lives; how many steps we take in a day, how much time we spend on leisure activities, how many personal projects we take on outside of work—
In fact, the Journal of Consumer Research published an article in December 2016 exemplifying how a busy and overworked lifestyle has become an aspirational status symbol to be emulated and sought after.
With the availability of software capable to provide us with real-time progress reports at the tap of a smartphone, we have more opportunities than ever for self-criticism. Through visualising and tracking our progress we are encouraged to pay particular attention to the times that we fall short of our expectations. This is problematic as the dips on a line chart do not allow for individual circumstances, they don't reflect when you've had a bad day or a tough week.
Unlike competitors who market themselves with optimistic data visualization, soothing clean minimal layouts and the promise that their product will make customers more accomplished while alleviating stress—WHAT IF takes a magnifying glass to commodified productivity. Shining a yellow luminescent phone screen onto the panic that can arise from a fixation on constantly optimising, tracking, enumerating and comparing achievements with peers and past performance.
This assessment required the students to identify potential gaps in the market within their chosen sector, creating a brand which differed from the competition, while commenting on current social or environmental issues. The brand positioning could be unrealistic and exaggerated; i.e. a brand that deliberately delivers poor customer service as part of their marketing strategy.
