Designed a productivity app around one timeline and one button, removing the “where does this go?” decision that makes people abandon task apps. The unified entry cut the taps to create a task by about 40%.
What I did
The starting point
The productivity market is crowded and retention is the unsolved problem. The leading apps share one pattern: feature fatigue. Enormous power, but real setup and real mental effort just to organise a day.
People abandon them because organising the work feels heavier than doing the work. Every project, label and folder is one more decision before the task exists.
So the brief wasn’t “a cleaner to-do app”. It was a measurable hypothesis: if capturing a task takes under ten seconds, people open the app every day and stay.
the target from opening the app to a saved task. Every screen was judged against it.
fewer taps to create a task than in nested-menu apps, measured on the final prototype.
Six rules. Every screen that followed had to pass them.
Writing comes first. Where it belongs is decided by the date, not by the user.
A single button adds a goal, a task, a note or a reminder from anywhere.
Targets big enough to hit while moving, because that’s when ideas arrive.
Goals, tasks and notes must read differently in grayscale, through weight and shape.
Red marks the add action and today. Nothing else gets to compete for the eye.
Deep corner radii and warm grey, so the tool feels friendly rather than administrative.
Who I designed for
An idea arrives on the street or in a meeting. The only goal is to get it out of her head before it’s gone. Any screen between the thought and the keyboard is a reason to not bother.
Needs: one tap to type, a confirm button she can hit without looking
Sunday evening, organising the week. She wants to see what is already on each day, give new items a time and a repeat, and move between days without losing the overview.
Needs: a week strip, time and repeat fields, a timeline that reads at a glance
Both modes start from the same red button. The difference is how far she goes: capture stops at the first screen, planning continues into time, date and repeat. The app never asks which mode she’s in.
Discovery & reframing
The first concept was a better folder system. Watching people use those apps changed my mind: they weren’t slow at typing, they were stuck deciding where to put a task. Work or personal? Urgent or someday? I called it categorisation paralysis.
So I reframed the strategy from “better organisation” to “streamlined capture” and removed folders entirely, in favour of a chronological timeline. The riskiest decision in the project, and the only one consistent with the goal. A date is a fact she already knows. A category is a decision she has to make.
The result: the question “where does this go?” disappears from the flow. The only input Mento needs beyond the text is a date, and the timeline does the organising.
The unified entry
With everything in one stream, the + button became the most important interaction in the app. It had to open four object types without bringing tabs back. I sketched two directions and tested both.
The contextual menu, speed-dial bubbles that keep the timeline visible, is the standard pattern. It failed: while walking, three out of ten taps missed.
The full-screen stack, four full-width buttons, hides the timeline for a moment but gives every target the width of the phone. I chose it, following Fitts’s law: at the moment of capture, hitting the button matters more than seeing the list behind it.
From the first sketch to the final UI: four full-width targets, one per object type, and the same red button at the bottom to add or confirm.
Speed-dial bubbles that keep the timeline visible. Standard, but the small targets produced a 30% mis-tap rate when users added items in motion.
Decision
Each option is a full-width button. The timeline disappears for one tap, and comes back the moment the item is saved.
Decision
The red bar reads + on the timeline and ✓ on the entry screen. One place to look, whatever the step.
Decision
Goal, task, note, reminder. Anything that didn’t fit one of the four was a sign the model was wrong, not a reason for a fifth.
01
Goals with progress, this week’s tasks, the latest note and reminder. The red + sits at the bottom.
02
Four full-width targets. Big enough to hit while walking.
03
The cursor is already in the title. Time, date and repeat are there if she wants them, pre-filled if she doesn’t.
04
The same red bar now reads ✓. No separate save button to find.
05
The item appears on its day, with the time and duration as pills. Nothing to file.
The result: from the dashboard to a saved task in four taps, and the mis-tap problem from the speed dial gone, because there is nothing small left to hit.
Timeline
Removing tabs moved the problem. The question became “how does one list show a goal, a task, a note and a reminder without them blurring together?”
I designed in grayscale first, so hierarchy couldn’t lean on colour. The first test showed why: goals looked identical to tasks. I fixed it with type weight and shape: goals get a heavier title and a progress fill, tasks get a time range and duration pills, notes are plain text, reminders carry a count.
The progress fill is the card background itself. 70% is read before the words are.
Time first, then the title, then two pills: when and how long. The description stays small.
The week strip is the only navigation. Today is the one red circle on the screen, apart from the button.
Every item sits at its time. Repeats are stated in words, “Repeats every two weeks”, not with an icon she has to learn.
The week strip moves the whole list. The “Tomorrow” pill on each card confirms which day she is looking at.
Prototype
Dashboard, timeline, add, write, confirm, back. This is the prototype the usability tests ran on, and where the 40% figure comes from: taps to create a task, counted against the same task in a nested-menu app.
The result: four content types in one list, each recognisable in grayscale, and a timeline that reads top to bottom like the day itself.
Visual system
The palette is utilitarian. Warm grey (#E5E5E5) instead of stark white, for a screen people open many times a day. Red is reserved for two things: the add action and today. Because nothing else is red, the eye goes there instantly.
Everything sits on cards with a deep corner radius, so the tool feels tangible rather than clinical. With no colour coding and no folders, spacing and type weight carry the whole hierarchy.
Add button, today
Cards, fields
Goal progress fill
Screen background
Titles, body text
Times, descriptions
One red bar per screen. It adds on the timeline and confirms on the entry screen.
Full-width grey buttons for the four object types.
Grey pills for when and how long. The red circle is today, and only today.
What I learned
With no folders and no tabs, there is no chrome to hide behind. Typography and spacing are all there is, so the simple version took more iteration than a feature-rich one would have.
fewer taps to create a task, against standard nested-menu architectures
The first version was designed for someone sitting still. Testing showed the app gets used in motion, and what worked on a desktop mock-up failed on the street. That changed the entry pattern, and it changed how I test.
Questions
It changes what a project is. In Mento a project is a goal, and a goal is a card with a progress fill on the dashboard. The tasks that serve it live on their dates, not under the goal, because the question people ask is “what do I do today?”, not “what belongs to project X?”.
Because the test said so. The speed-dial menu that kept the timeline visible produced a 30% mis-tap rate when people added items while walking. Full-width buttons removed the misses. Seeing the list behind the menu was worth less than hitting the right button.
From counting taps on the prototype against the same task in a standard nested-menu app: open, choose a category, navigate to the list, add, type, set a date, save. Mento removes the category decision and the navigation, and merges add and save into one button.