Many people lack an effective system to manage their tasks. As a result, they spend too much time on trivial tasks and leave more meaningful tasks unfinished. Without an effective prioritization strategy, it is easy to become overwhelmed and feel unaccomplished at the end of the day.

A comprehensive task management application that helps users identify their priorities, allowing them to stay focused and make progress on what truly matters.

I began by conducting research to gain a better understanding of the concept of priority and its advantages.

To better understand how people manage their busy days, I conducted interviews with 7 individuals from various professions.

Through these interviews, I discovered that organizing tasks by their deadline may not always be the most optimal approach to managing one's day. This insight presented an opportunity to explore the issue further.

After conducting interviews, I did more research to gain a deeper understanding of the issue at hand.

According to a recent study, there is a psychological concept known as the Mere Urgency Effect, which explains our inclination to prioritize time-sensitive tasks over those that are not, even when the non-time-sensitive tasks have objectively greater rewards. In other words, what is important is often neglected in favor of what is urgent.

Furthermore, research indicates that individuals who consider themselves busy are more susceptible to the Mere Urgency Effect. This phenomenon suggests that people who feel they have less time are less likely to use it effectively.

Once I had a better understanding of the problem, I analyzed several existing solutions to determine if and how they help people prioritize their tasks.

I specifically examined mobile applications because I found them to be the most appropriate tool for managing tasks, as people typically have their phones with them at all times.

Task management applications can help users list their tasks, but this is only half the battle. These applications do not provide an in-depth approach for determining which tasks to prioritize or how to prioritize them.

My research shows that people often mistake urgent tasks for important ones, leading them to prioritize trivial tasks with close deadlines over more significant ones. I brainstormed solutions to help people combat this.

After evaluating the effectiveness and feasibility of different ideas, the best solution is to design a task management application with built-in prioritization tools that will help users identify which tasks matter.

In order to effectively tackle tasks that truly matter, the first step is to identify which ones are important rather than merely urgent. Therefore, a method for quantifying importance is necessary.

The action priority matrix is a tool used to prioritize tasks based on their importance rather than their urgency. It sorts tasks according to their impact relative to the amount of effort needed to complete them.

This is an important distinction because it allows users to focus on more meaningful tasks, not just those with the closest deadlines.

Initially, the plan was to incorporate the action priority matrix into the application, enabling users to plot directly onto the chart. However, after designing some low-fidelity wireframes and conducting preliminary testing, I found that this approach was ineffective and confusing, primarily due to limited screen space.

To improve usability and intuitiveness, I simplified the action priority matrix by extracting its core and developing it into the main feature of the application: the Priority Score.

The Priority Score is a value that represents the priority of a given task. When users create a new task, they are prompted with two questions:

The design of the task card is the most important aspect of a task management application. Understanding how much information should be available at a glance, and what that information should be was crucial in designing the perfect task card.

I created several different iterations by experimenting with different combinations of elements, style, and hierarchy. During this process, I tried including various features such as sub-tasks and swipe-to-clear.

Ultimately, I opted for a simple interface that is intuitive to use and emphasizes the Priority Score feature.

To help users distinguish between urgent and impactful tasks, I implemented two separate input modals that run independently of each other when creating a new task. This allows for the sorting of urgent and impactful tasks to be done separately.

Users wanted to be able to quickly glance at their list and see the task's priority without having to think about a numbering system. To address this issue, I made some visual design changes to the ranking system on the home screen by adding colors and user-friendly language to make it easier to understand at a glance.

With all this into account, below are the final high-fidelity prototypes of Clear in action:

Clear is still a conceptual application, so its real-life impact on helping users prioritize cannot be tested yet.

However, the research behind this concept is based on real insights and information. As a result, the projected results are as follows: