People see to-do lists as a burden. I wanted to change that.

The project

People see to-do lists as a burden. I wanted to change that.

The problem

Here’s the thing: the productivity app market is huge. Todoist, Notion, TickTick, Any.do — all with millions of users. And still most people quietly abandon them within weeks.

The problem isn’t a lack of features. It’s how these apps make you feel. Tasks pile up. You open the app and instead of motivation you get a wall of unfinished business staring back at you. That feeling of forever falling behind isn’t a bug — it’s practically baked into how these tools are designed. They’re built to manage tasks, but nobody thought about managing the user’s state of mind.

On top of that, I noticed two recurring UX patterns that made things worse in every competitor I studied:

• Context loss when switching modes — getting from the task list to the calendar takes several taps, and by the time you’re there you’ve forgotten what you were working on;
• Completed tasks simply vanish — instead of a sense of progress you get an empty screen. Not exactly motivating.

The target audience made it all even more concrete: women 25–45 in Canada, tech-fluent, focused on personal growth. They don’t need a corporate task manager. They need something that feels like part of their lifestyle.

What people actually need (Jobs To Be Done)

Before touching any UI, I mapped out the real jobs people “hire” a planner for.

Research and benchmarks

I deliberately looked beyond the to-do category for better UX patterns: competitors are useful for feature reference, but the best interaction ideas came from elsewhere.

• A fitness app sparked the home screen customization idea — the user decides what lives there, creates their own folders, picks how each section looks. Full ownership of the space.
• A focus/time app showed how the “grow with the app” concept works visually — rich palettes, fluid illustrations, a daily timeline the user builds themselves. Its social sharing mechanics were interesting too.
• An all-in-one app (tasks + email + calendar on one screen, no tab bar) pushed me to minimize mode switching. One screen — everything at hand.
• A meditation app struck a perfect balance between visual richness and usability, and its personal stats screen became a great reference for letting users feel the product’s value.

The key UX insight

Most apps mix routines and tasks into a single list — and that’s exactly where the cognitive load comes from.

I split them into two parallel streams:

• Routine — your recurring personal rhythm. The morning schedule you build for yourself. No obligations, just support: set a reminder or ignore it entirely. Inside the Routine column there’s a time slider showing where you are in your day.
• Tasks — concrete to-dos with modifiers: time, reminder, category, repeat, subtasks.

Both streams live side by side on the home screen and scroll independently. It’s Thinkii’s main structural differentiator — everything else in the design flows from it.

Branding

Before settling on the final concept, I worked through three metaphors:

• The hourglass — Thinkii saves time and nerves. Every small step counts. 1% better every day.
• The list and the pause — a clean sheet the user fills in their own way. Growing together.
• The playful ii — live brightly, build routines that give you energy.

The winning idea came from the name itself. The two letters “ii” in Thinkii naturally become eyes. The slogan: Keep an eye on things.

It works on three levels at once — name, logo and meaning are inseparable. Brand coherence like that is hard to fake.

Design system first

Before touching the final screens I gathered client feedback and built a full UI kit. A deliberate choice: every major direction was agreed on before anything went to production. No wasted work.

Here’s what the system covers:

• The card system — the visual heart of the app. Tasks render as adaptive cards supporting 7 modifiers (category, note, time, reminder, importance, repeat, subtask). Typography scales from 26px with minimal info down to 16px for longer text. Importance cards invert to dark — a visual priority signal without extra icons.
• Buttons — 4 variants × 3 sizes × a full state matrix: light green, white, dark, outline.
• Colors — a token system with opacity steps from /700 to /100 for both base colors.
• Components — radio buttons, input fields, the search field — every state: empty, active, filled, disabled.

Wireframes and interaction testing

Before the full UI I went through a wireframe phase to stress-test the key interactions — the two-column layout, edge-of-screen gestures, task completion behavior, the relationship between Routine and Tasks.

This was an MVP. I ran no formal user tests. I assembled the flow, used it myself and kept asking: does this feel natural? Does the one-handed gesture make sense? Does the information hierarchy hold when the cards are full?

• The edge swipe for creating a new task needed a visible hint — without it users would never find it;
• The two-column scroll was disorienting at first, until I firmly anchored the time navigation (All / Today / Tomorrow) at the top;
• Task completion needed more feedback than a simple squeeze — the interaction had to feel deliberate, not accidental.

Once there was a working prototype, I put it in the client’s hands. Not to validate the visuals — that came later — but to test the interaction model. Are the gestures intuitive? Does the Routine/Tasks split make sense in practice? Does creating a task feel fast enough?

The client’s feedback confirmed most of my hypotheses and surfaced one key adjustment: the task completion gesture had to be a single, decisive action — no ambiguity about whether it worked. That’s what shaped the final interaction pattern.

People see to-do lists as a burden. So how did I change that?

I made five concrete design decisions — each aimed squarely at the anxiety typical to-do apps create.

The home screen shows two parallel columns — today on the left, tomorrow on the right. You see both days at once, no screen switching. A horizontal scroll stitches tasks and calendar into one continuous canvas, so the schedule and the to-do list never feel like separate places. And if today is overloaded — drag a task straight from the left column to the right. No menus, no rescheduling flow, just move it.

I turned completed tasks into momentum. When you mark something done, the card flies up off the screen and fills one of the dots in the progress grid — like in the home screen widget. Every completed task lights another circle. The more you do, the more the grid floods with acid green. A small thing that works: instead of watching a list shrink, you watch something grow. The “one more” instinct becomes natural. And when everything’s done, there’s a real moment of celebration instead of an empty screen.

I used the screen edges as triggers. Swipe from the top — add a task. Swipe from the left — open the profile. No button hunting, no extra taps. One-handed, on any phone size, in any context — even when you can’t type, you can dictate.

Acid lime and deep olive. Category colors you choose yourself. Cards that inherit your category’s color. The app doesn’t look like a corporate tool — it looks like yours.

The result — a planner that works with your energy, not against it.

Key screens and decisions

Home screen

The splash screen greets the user by name on acid green — the app knows you before you’ve done anything.

First launch is an onboarding flow: I introduce the key features, show how the app works and guide the user to their first action. No empty screen, no confusion.

The two-column layout is visible right away. Time navigation (All / Today / Tomorrow) is a horizontal swipe, not separate screens. The task counter in the header shows progress at a glance.

“What you want to do?” — voice and text input available from every screen. Voice is especially handy when typing is awkward.

Creating a task

The user starts with just a title. Everything else — category, time, reminder, importance, repeat, subtasks — is optional, available as tags at the bottom of the form. No overload, no imposed structure.

Categories can be created right in the flow: pick a color, type a name, save. The card automatically inherits the category color. Voice input switches to text with a single tap.

Calendar

Hidden by default — users who don’t think in dates never see it. Entry is through the date widget in the header. Available in light and dark (olive) themes. Dots on the calendar grid show task density without opening each day.

Search, profile and archive

Working with the client

Every major direction was agreed on before implementation — that’s how I delivered a full product in 5 weeks without painful rework.

Here’s what the feedback loop looked like in practice. After seeing early concepts, the client came back with this:

“Task completion should be one click. For example, a fire emoji when a task is done. I like these colors — the contrast with black. Top block: today’s Google Calendar events. Bottom block: upcoming tasks for the week. Accent pastel colors. Logo: a playful liquid ‘i’ with eyes.”

Feedback that concrete and visual is gold. It shaped the dark accent for reminders, the category color system, the logo and the overall home screen structure. I didn’t argue — I ran with it.

The result

Thinkii lives at thinkii.app on two plans:

• Free — Today + Tomorrow planning, Running List, 5 life categories, unlimited tasks, progress tracking;
• Plus ($4.99/mo) — AI voice-to-task, bulk text-to-task, recurring tasks, reminders.

My role

Art director and UX/UI lead. I was responsible for:

• UX strategy: information architecture and key interaction patterns;
• the brand concept and identity system;
• building the design system from scratch;
• client communication and iterative sign-off;
• art direction of the final screens.

Thanks to the team

Lisa Furina, Daria Tukhtaniiazova, Anel Bulatova — thank you for a great project.