Twiddle

Reimagining the estimated time of arrival for people.

Project Overview

Twiddle is a mobile application that solves a common problem of waiting on people. Whether it is meeting up with a small group of friends or planning for a dinner party, there will always be those people that we have to wait on.

Waiting for someone can be a problem because not knowing the exact time of a friend’s arrival can make you a little frustrated. Even if your friend provides a message explaining that they will be late, you usually don’t know the latecomer’s location of how far they are. Sometimes, not knowing their wait time, can make you wait more, causing more anxiety for you.

Project Name

Twiddle iOS App

Client

BFA Design

Services

Social, Location

Research

Based on our set list of stakeholders, we conducted user research which included in person interviews, surveys, and literature. We interviewed various professionals on the issues of urban planning as well as the most common methods of transportation. User surveys were created for random individuals on how they perceived waiting in the scenario of meeting up with a person or group.

Personas

Personas were created from the user research to key in various types of potential users. The personas were also used to create user journey maps to help map out pain points during an experience.

Timothy

Always Late
16 years old, Student
He meets up with his friends often to play games and he continues the game at home by going online. He could do better in his other school classes if he has better time management skills. When he is focused on a computer science problem, he can easily forget about other tasks. The situation is the same with computer games; once he has started playing. He is aware of his problem and wants improve.

Philip

Always Early
40 years old, Developer
Philip works at Invisalign as a web developer. He has always been a math and science oriented person. He thinks ahead of any situation and makes plans step-by step. He does not like surprises because he needs to know what to expect. Otherwise, he can be easily distracted. He likes to take control of everything. He is a very rational person. He always gives himself some extra time before heading to a place to avoid being late.

Gabrielle

Always On-Time
24 years old, Bank Teller
Gabrielle makes sure that when she writes something on her planner, she is fully committed to being on time, regardless of her being lazy. Whenever Gabrielle is late, she feels apologetic towards the people/person waiting for her. She doesn’t like the feeling when someone is waiting for her. The only times that she’s usually late is because of traffic conditions.

Ideations

After all the user research and study is completed. We started ideation. It started with rapid paper prototyping to see which of the many features would have potential. In addition to rapid-prototyping, we created information architectures and users flow to assist with the feature list.

Solution

The name was inspired by the phrase to “twiddle one’s thumb” in the meaning to spend time idly while waiting for something to happen. We refined our concepts down to 3 to 4 main features. We also had some time to create a bit of branding. Twiddle primarily uses a deep orange, light and muted blue and a dark grey. The orange was used as it sort of a neutral in American traffic lights. It is in the the between phase of stop and go, similar to the phase of waiting or arriving. Typefaces used are Bree and Proxima Nova. Bree was used mainly for headers and certain time numerals. It contrasted well with Proxima Nova which is clean and easy to read.

Tracking Events and Creating Challenges

People like to track everything and keep things recorded. We want our app to improve people's timing and habits. We are not trying to change users’ behaviors drastically, but we believe that everything starts from getting a little awareness. Having the challenge history and arrival history available to users, they will be able to keep track of how they are doing. Our app will also give them simple advice if they have been late recently.

Estimated Time of Arrival

Showing everyone’s estimated arrival will be an important feature in our app. We are not trying to take away waiting itself, as it is inevitable, but trying to improve the waiting experience by allowing people to know when others are arriving.

Challenges and Gamification

Challenges allow friendly competition among friends. From our research earlier, we found that a challenge feature would motivate users to use our app. The challenge can be customized by selecting who to challenge and what the “penalty” is. Also, they users can ignore the presets and create their own challenge completely.