Our work on mental reminder has been primarily to establish a functional Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The current Mental Reminder app functions as intended and allows users to go through all the basic features involved in the core user journey - in other words, they can successfully utilize our application to solve the original ICT solution.
From a project perspective, we sought to explore the various ways we can use UI and UX in a fairly simple application to alleviate the stress and anxiety brought about by other similar productivity apps on the market. We feel that we have accomplished this to a satisfactory degree.
That being said, there are a lot of other features that we wanted to implement but felt were out of the project's scope and intended implementation timeline of four weeks.
Currently, our application is strictly data-base free. Our original rationale behind this was research driven - during our systematic literature review, we realized that user trust was a massive aspect as to how to retain users and prevent user attrition. Doing further research into the topic led us to discover that security breaches and the general lack of public understanding on cloud computing/databases was one of the larger concerns for technology in the public eye. Our application is simple enough to where a database is not necessary for storage, and database-centered implementation would only increase technical debt and over complicate things for the future.
However, after discussion with our project advisor and instructor, we're open to the idea of maybe having a sign-in system with a database. The only case where our application might suffer from only having locally stored data is data loss on moving to a new device. Realistically, this doesn't happen every day for most people, but it happens enough to where we must evaluate and consider this use case.
In an ideal world, usage of this app is limited to things that come up super often - moments where your parents ask you to do chores or you have a fleeting thought to do a common chore that u haven't quite made a routine yet. In these cases, it shouldn't be too difficult to remake those presets - the only thing you lose out on is user data, but even then that impermanence is a large part in establishing user trust.
In summary, we are open to the idea of introducing a database to our system, but it is not required.
In an ideal world, this would already be implemented - however between the technical debt and various project management concerns that arose during development, we didn't get a chance to implement the option to edit presets in depth. This would include automatically setting times for presets, as well as setting icons for those presets for a more friendly and usable feel.
Should future work continue on the app, this would be the first thing to be added.
Going back to our use case analysis and mobile usage paradigms, we figured it might be a good idea to allow users what fields defaulted to. For example, if users find themselves commonly needing to be reminded of short term tasks instead of long term tasks, they would be able to adjust the default value of when that reminder would be due to something that better suits their workflow.
In the case of user happy paths, where they have a task that isn't necessarily recurring but happens often enough at a general time, they would be able to set that reminder even faster than before.
We didn't get a chance to implement this feature as we were more focused on pushing out the core featureset within the intended timeline, but this would be a more than welcome solution that wouldn't inflate our featureset since it would be hidden within the menu.
In our initial user testing during the design phase, one of the smallest features that garnered the most acclaim was the dark mode toggle switch on the menu. This is an extremely popular feature across all modern applications that we simply didn't have time to get to due to time and technical constraints.
Given ample time, we're certain that it would be a welcome addition to our featureset, despite our intentions to keep the featureset minimal.