Categorise | Gamifying categorisation with cards and swiping

[iteles]

These days you hardly ever find people lost in thought - they're always lost in their phones.

But what if we could find a way to make those lost moments waiting for a bus or in a queue or waiting to leave the house actually useful ones?
Make it just as entertaining for people to categorise their ideas/tasks and divide tasks into sub-tasks as it would be to reach for instagram.

This is currently an embryonic idea but in my mind the way this looks is that when initial ideas are captured, they all go into an inbox.
When people open the app they can choose 'Review' or 'Categorise' or even 'Quick task' mode (a better nomenclature needed) and this takes them to a screen where they can do one or all of the following:

Categorise

• Each of their uncategorised notes appears in 'card' format
• Starting at the top, they click to expand a task they want to categorise
  • The task opens and they are prompted to categorise the task &/or add tags
  • This screen should be the full task so they can actually also add in other things from here (seeing as it is on their mind, they can also add a deadline, sub-tasks, etc - everything you can do for a task)
  • Once saved they are rewarded with some kind of points for having taken action on this and it takes them back to the card view
    • Either this or some cutesy animation but that could get old
    • I see this as the key to making it almost as appealing as scrolling - at the end of the week they could see how much time they didn't spend on other scrolling activities
  • They can then scroll to the next card from here with an auto-save
• If they don't want to categorise the task now, they swipe (in some direction, I have no idea) and it disappears for this session

Add sub-tasks

• Similar to the above, the initial screen shows cards and starting at the top, when you click or pull-down on a specific task, it opens up that task
• Here you're encourage to break the task down into multiple sub-tasks or decide whether this task is small enough to be stand-alone
  • If it is small enough, that also counts on you making a decision on it and counts towards points

Review to-dos

• This is almost an entirely separate use case but this builds on the idea of being able to trust the application because it surfaces 'long lost things' (or whatever user testing deems useful) and nothing falls into a black hole of endless scrolling
• Whilst starting from the same starting point, we are encouraging people on a monthly/quarterly basis to review their 'someday' or less viewed items so taht they don't get forgotten
• Here they can choose to never be shown this item again for review
• They can also choose to snooze it so that they're only shown the item every few months

EXPLANATORY NOTE: The key here is that these are all important tasks that have to be carried out to maximise personal effectiveness and peace of mind/trust in the app. So gamifying them as well as helping you to be more productive with a 2 minute block of time that might get interrupted at some unknown interval is the win.

[nelsonic]

@iteles love the idea of promoting good habits through light gamification (provided we give people the option to completely hide the feature if they don't want it). I've increased to priority-3 because I think it can be a very good feature to include fairly early on in the product to drive positive behaviour ASAP.

[iteles]

Removing the priority label altogether as per our team discussion around new processes in: #239 (comment)