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flowr

Spend less time on time management. Flowr is an organizational tool designed by a frustrated UX student for students. Its three core functions: enabling students to prioritize work, giving them a way to track progress on that work, and quickly summarizing their grades across their classes.

  • Full Stack Designer & Developer
  • Side Project
  • January 2019 - Present

As one of my first user-centered projects, I picked something where I could use my own experience as a significant research resource. From there, I was able to create a concept that I would go on to iterate and gather feedback on.

Here's what I learned while working on it:

  • Doing user interviews, without the interview
  • Spending time on the problem makes the solution clear

Doing user interviews, without the interview

Being a UX student inside my own target audience meant I could observe day-to-day pain points constantly — sitting next to other students cramming for deadlines, watching how they triaged what to work on next, and noting which tools they fell back to (paper notebooks, Google Calendar, Notes apps). That ambient research informed early concepts long before I sat anyone down for a formal session.

Spending time on the problem makes the solution clear

The temptation with a personal project is to jump straight into the solution — "I'll build a kanban board with grade tracking." Instead, restating the problem repeatedly forced me to separate the what (prioritize work) from the how (a list? a grid? a Pomodoro timer?). Once the problem was crisp, the solution shape mostly chose itself.