Is your time management application looking a lot like the others?
If it’s not easy to separate your solution from other apps used for task management and time tracking then it may be time to look for ideas the others aren’t already using.
Such as ideas from academic research. Or business schools… gamification… interface design… habit formation.
Or from schools of thought that don’t start with G and end with D. (Hint: there’s a T in the middle there, somewhere!)
Perhaps it’s been a while since an average, non-geek used your app and claimed it was a fun experience? (When did that become a requirement of apps in this niche?)
As you have probably noticed, the bar has been raised. Users want more than a place to store information on their tasks, appointments and time usage. Today, there are a ton of apps that offer reliability across platforms, in the cloud, perfectly synced, and even do so for multiple users.
For free.
Users have responded as they usually do… by refusing to pay, and by jumping around from one solution to another, and even back again. They want more than a reliable database, they crave engagement, learning, growth, mastery, a journey, recognition, surprises, and a feeling like they are winning.
I’m sure I might agree with you here – there aren’t any easy answers.
But if you join up with us and participate in the work we are doing, you may discover some of the right questions to ask.
Join my mailing list for application developers of time and task management products and I’ll promise to expose you to some new thinking. Here at 2Time Labs we comb all available sources of ideas and package them up in ways that helps designers get their solutions to stand out from the crowd.
We share these insights on this website, in books, on podcasts and in a Google Plus community so that you can find them in raw form, perhaps refining and applying them to your own efforts. We also provide advisory services to select companies that develop apps (like SkedPal) when we stumble upon ideas or teams with the unique potential to change the world.
No kidding… there are billions of adult humans (i.e. the majority) who are using memory, paper, and digital solutions to manage their time-based productivity. Each day they wake up wanting to be a little more productive than yesterday: they are looking to people like you and me to offer them help.
If this vision sounds even a bit familiar, and you sense that we can be helpful, don’t hesitate to join up and establish a fresh line of communication to share ideas.
Stay in Touch
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