Ballist

An interactive tangible to-do list

Ballist is a tangible interactive to-do list. It combines an Android application together with the physical device made with Arduino and laser cutter. The concept of combining software and hardware is to stand out from tons of existing to-do list mobile applications which are less interesting and motivative. We aim to encourage people by giving them better experiences when setting and finishing the daily tasks.

Time and Place

April 2015

Paris, France

My Contribution

User experience design

Interaction design

Product design

My Role

UI / UX Designer

Interaction Designer

How often do you just make a to-do list but never review it again? How many tasks on the to-do list you completed at the end?

The interesting point is that most of us, including to-do list haters, keep making to-do list, and so do 63% of professionals, according to a survey released by LinkedIn. The popular to-do list appears to be rather ineffective. Is the to-do list just a blunt instrument to be used in the quest for personal productivity and getting stuff done? Or does the weakness lie deeper in ourselves in our human struggle to impose order and control? With these doubts, we started to do user research.

PERSONA

BRAINSTORMING

We started this project by gathering user’s real needs. Through conducting questionnaire and three semi-structured interviews, we collected the information about what we should have and what we miss. In addition, inspired by Marble Answer Machine (by Durrell Bishop, student at the Royal College of Art, 1992) which is a prototype telephone answer machine, that incoming voice messages are represented by marbles. Therefore, we planned to make a tangible and interactive to-do list and let users interact with the tasks themselves.

PRODUCT CONCEPT

The initial idea of this tangible to-do list contains a fish-feeding machine meaning people have to finish a certain amount of tasks to feed the fish. The product is designed in a simple way in the end: the balls representing tasks can show the progress and remind users of the current task status. Users can also interact with the marble to update the task progress. The connection between application and device is simply by Bluetooth. In this way, users can easily manage their daily tasks.