App Redesign

For a smooth,
straightforward experience.

Time Timer App

Problem

Significant Usability Challenges

Due to its deviation from industry standards, users struggle with the app's unconventionality, confusing navigation, misleading labels, undue exertion, and guesswork. Lack of intuitive design and significant learning curve leads to a potential loss of 77% of users on day three.

Goal

Redesign the Time Timer app to:

Improve usability
Reduce cognitive load
Create a more intuitive experience
Design for beauty and simplicity

Approach

Through a rigorous iterative design process, which included comprehensive user testing, prototyping, and multiple design cycles, I was able to deliver highly effective, user-centric solutions.

Conducted usability testing with real users to identify pain points
Created sketches, wireframes and interactive prototypes
Ran iterative testing cycles to refine navigation, labeling, and settings structure
Iterations focused on simplifying interactions and clarifying visual hierarchy

Research

Competitor Analysis &
Screen-by-Screen Task Analysis

Pain Point 1

After Setting a timer, users searched for a way to know that their timer was set and wasted time looking for a clue.

Pain Point 2

Users became frustrated and wasted a lot of time scrolling through the drawer and trying to figure out what all the options were.

Pain Point 3

Navigating between the plus icon, last, and timer is confusing due to multiple unclear menu and tab labels.

Performance Indicators

Decrease in user confusion during timer setup
Improved first-time task success rate
Reduction in time spent navigating to key features
Instant icon recognition and label comprehension

Solution

A redesigned Time Timer app with streamlined navigation, standard iconography, and clearly separated system vs. timer-level settings. Label copy was rewritten for clarity, and the interface was reorganized to support intuitive task flow.

Key Takeaways

Flow matters

Structuring the app around user goals reduced friction and made the experience more intuitive.

Clarity beats cleverness

Replacing unconventional icons and labels with standard, recognizable ones significantly improved usability.

Settings should feel obvious, not obscure

By clearly separating app-level and timer-level controls, the need for guesswork was eliminated.

Iteration is everything

User testing at each design phase was key to refining pain points and validating improvements.

Contribution

Collaborators

Edie Shieh

Managed the project timeline and provided valuable design reviews

User Participants

Thanks to Juniper, Puneet, and Sunday for user testing

Testing My Prototypes

Special thanks to Neha, Hilary, Justin, and Sidhant for their excellent and thorough feedback on the prototypes

My Contribution

Research

Initial design analysis, competitor research, UX product testing

Ideation

Information architecture, streamlined solutions from testing data analysis

Design

Second phase testing & analysis, flow chart, interface, sketches, Lo-fi & Hi-fi prototyping

Supplemental Images

Many users reported challenges when trying to use the settings located in the “drawer”. The issue was that there were SO many options with no indication as to what the options were for.