I was trying to show my skills and grow my client-base by making some time-lapse UI content on TikTok. Then a comment came asking to turn a plant tracker concept into a to-do list.
Within 3 hours, I had a revised to-do list concept, animated and to a trending song (I later named those "feature trailers").
The comments rolled in asking for features, people had great insights and incredible ideas and slowly I learned to pull more out of people through commenting.
Little did I know, I was Building in Public.
Product Design, Rapid Prototyping, Iterative reworks with Build in Public loop, Branding, Development of beta, Product Management of the native apps, Marketing & Content production to 60k installs in the first quarter.
Users
Task Completion
Lives Changed
From the initial re-design, I planned to have customizable list layouts that you could drag and drop.
Early on, I got a lot of requests for making the lists different colors. This lead to a focus on customization not only through layouts, but also in style. Different colors mean different things.
The request for Tabs came early and was also very impactful on the experience. With Tabs, you could have different Tabs for different activities and routines in your life. Based on time of day, Tabs would appear "front-of-the-line" and so could your lists.
This was a lightbulb moment for me about how to Build in Public.
Now, I don't have ADHD. At times designing this app I felt like what Nir Eyal says about the Peddlers (if a product helps users, but it's used by the one who makes it). But, having the community there to crowd source feedback with made it so easy to work with. The biggest thing was that I had to keep making new concepts to test with, see what people had to say about it or if it sparked ideas, iterate, and start again.
After doing user interviews and looking through the data, I realized the issue TaskTree was a fully customizable tool, but in that customization, it took a bit of work to setup.
By the end of the week, we had Tab Templates launched which let users choose to work from a template of pre-built List layouts. This was further refined by giving users a tutorial video along with CTAs to create a tab template.
My biggest Takeaway:
This project changed the way I look at product development. And while building it out, I thought it'd be able to go on forever, but after launching I realized just how important doing traditional UX studies is.
People collaborating look at new products rose-colored-glasses, but in the end those products need to be optimized to get them to move.
