Productivity apps need to have a beautiful UI. There are a lot of To Do List Apps out there and when asked why they like the one they use, people seem to always list “it looks nice” right as their top or second reason.
Simply Goals & Tasks offers lots of features new to the To Do List space that help our users be their most productive selves, but that doesn’t excuse us from needing to be beautiful.
Why is a beautiful UI so important for productivity apps?
One, the whole point is to save us time and make us more productive. That’s not going to happen if we are losing time struggling with a difficult to use app.
Two, because we open these apps several times a day and it makes us feel good to have beauty in our lives.
Since our last update, Google has announced their new design standard: Material Design.
Material Design is about simple “flat” user interfaces with layers that stack on top of each other like paper. The end result is simple, clean, and pleasing to the eye.
There are new UI elements for us as designers and developers to incorporate in our app, guidelines for standard user experiences, even standardized margin sizes.
We’ve done our best to incorporate these new features and standards into our app with this release. There was a lot to do, any existing beta users will notice the new look and feel an every screen.
Some changes didn’t make their way into this release. Those changes will be working their way into future releases, depending on how important we feel they are.
More than having a trendy design theme, we really want to make common behavior in the app as easy as possible.
For example, marking a task as done. You no longer need to “edit” the task to change its status to “Done”. Now when you click a task you see a new improved Task Detail screen. The bottom of this screen has buttons to quickly change this task’s status (Priority, Action, Waiting, Done).
Charting your time is a top priority. There is a new “Overview” section of the app which will be the main home for charts to understand your time.
The pie charts comparing your Ideal breakdown between Goals and Reality is now located in the Overview Section.
New to the Goals Section. In each Goal Detail screen, there is more info about the goal including how much time you spend in this one, both in a table and a new bar chart.
