UMO
Project UMO received Honourable Mention for the Award for Digital Marketing Design from the 2020 RGD Student Awards.
The project showcases can be found on the RGD website here.
ROLE
Ideation, Research
Visuals, Prototyping
TEAM
Lara Calucag
Heather Chang
TOOLS
Miro, Figma
Principle, After Effects
CATEGORY
Product Design,
Branding, UI/UX
“Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
—excerpt from Deep Work by Cal Newport
Problem
Our target audiences for UMO are students, ranging from middle school until university, and working adults up to the age of 40. Upon conducting our research on the effects of long working hours, we discovered that there are four main pain points: burnout, distractions, multi-tasking, and motivation.
These factors negatively impact our physical and mental health. A few notable mentions include stress, anxiety, exhaustion, and a steady decline of efficiency and productivity. The challenges we set out for UMO are to encourage healthier work habits and produce higher productivity while avoiding overwhelming students and working adults.
Our Solution
The Deep Work Method developed by Cal Newport, offers a solution by providing tips and "rules" on how to create a productive working environment in a healthy manner and avoid burnout. Enters UMO, the smart timer device and your personal study buddy! UMO is a productivity smart-timer, developed based on the Pomodoro Technique and Deep Work Method. It is designed to help users create a healthy routine for an efficient and productivity-driven working environment.
How does UMO work?
UMO divides your time into work and break sessions, which are tracked through the UMO app. The primary goal of our product is to train your brain into learning a better working routine; maximizing efficiency and avoiding burnout due to overworking. Get more done and have time to spare! What separates UMO from a regular timer are our special features: focus sessions, smart breaks, distraction blocker, time manager, ambience, as well as lightweight and portability. UMO follows the Pomodoro Technique by breaking down work sessions into 25-minute focus sessions, followed by a 5-minute smart break. After four consecutive Pomodoros, the user is rewarded with a 15-minute smart break. UMO also creates a better and more relaxing work environment through ambient light and sound. After working, users can track where their time is going by allocating sessions to tasks and its assigned tags on the app.
tracks your productivity progress and provides insight
offers a wide variety of ambience settings to get you into a productive mood
keeps distractions to a minimum by blocking apps (i.e. social media)
limits interactions with the UMO app through simplistic system design
