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Simon is an organizational platform that allows freelance workers to manage their projects and their relationship with several clients at once. The app is a personal assistant for freelancers in the creative industry. The goal of this app is to get freelancers more organized and help manage their projects. It functions quite similarly to having a personal assistant with the freedom of voice commands.
Click here to view Prototype
One of the problems we notice is freelance designers are trying to manage their time with school or work with there other freelance projects. Most freelancers will often rely on five different apps just to stay organized and attempt to time manage their projects. Sometimes it may feel impossible satisfy every client when on your own. The main challenge we will face is incorporating many functions within one app with a tight deadline. The challenge is how are we going to create an easier and more efficient experience for users using freelance & organizational app?
Simon is your very own personal A.I freelance assistant that we decided to integrate into the app itself. This would help to solve the issue of juggling everything by yourself. He will be right by your side whenever you need a hand. This app will be the organizational tool you need to help keep track and assisting to problem areas such as scheduling meetings, organizing emails, sending invoices, etc... From where ever you are, you can summon Simon and ask him anything.
By formulating a benchmark analysis we decided to team up with Toggle, a time management app to save time and to use an app that many people are familiar with.
As a student and freelancer, I understood the frustrations more designers face when it came to time management and tackling all the small components that cause stress. Although, I wanted to further understand the opinions of other freelance designers of all sectors. Therefore, our team created a PACT Analysis to help better visualize the scenario.
We also created a proposal tackling the 5W's and limitations, also a benchmark analysis
Right from the get go, we wanted to create and make the AI a male assistant. Most of the AI's we interact with have a female voice command like Siri, or Alexa. This was brought to my attention at a design conference and inspired our group to test and research more into this concept of the difference between male and female AI's. A challenge we realized we would face is having to properly test our AI and receive feedback. We then used the DECIDE framework to create our user test plan which helped guide us.
Mathew is a recent graduate design student and he is looking to freelance but is having trouble organizing his time with his busy schedule at his other job helping out the family raspberry farm business. He is looking to have an app that will help him organize his time and help find different job postings near by. Also, Mathew is quite nervous looking for freelance jobs because he has never worked in freelancing before so having some sort of guid or navigation through the app to make things simpler or a country boy would help him out a lot.
Laura is a freelance graphic designer and student. She took a year off to travel but she still doesn’t want to leave her clients behind. Laura isn’t confident enough that she can manage enjoying some travel time while also staying on top of every project. She also doesn’t have the money to afford a personal assistant to keep her projects and invoices in order. Laura discovered an app that helps you organize your freelance work and makes multitasking a lot easier. She is able to access the app anywhere she goes and feels that she can rely on a tool to alert her when she needs to send out an email or if a project deadline is coming up.
Cynthia is a freelance photographer who works on personal projects as well as for several newspapers. She travels around North America for work often, and sometimes oversees. She is sick of searching through many many emails to find project briefs and client feedback when she is rushing between shoots and meetings. She does a lot of editing and communicating with clients from airports, where there is already a high level of stress. Convenience and organization are very important to Cynthia’s ability to do her job well and professionally.
This is the start planing stage of the using the MoSCoW rules to determine what must be included in the app as well as what should, could and want in the app to help prioritize our design process.
We then started with some rough sketches of how the interface would look like such as the projects page, calendar page and what the A.I voice command would look like.
