Jenkins

Why A Smart Reminder App?

For a long time, I hurt my relationship with friends, colleagues, and family because I struggled to stay on top of emails, messages, and calls from them.

Through research, I discovered this challenge is common for many people.

The TLDR

A busy professional juggling emails, messages, and calls needs a way to stay on top of important conversations because they often forget to reply and risk straining relationships.

Problem Statement

A busy professional juggling emails, messages, and calls needs a way to stay on top of important conversations because they often forget to reply and risk straining relationships.

Importance of the Problem

"It takes 23 min to focus after getting distracted." - UCl.edu

"Workers who completed tasks in parallel took 30% longer and made 2x as many errors." - Richard L. Byyny, MD

"48% have had a relationship negatively impacted because of their slow response to messages." - Secure Data Recovery

Smart Reminders

Smart reminders would filter out the necessary notifications from the sea of many notifications that busy people receive.

Reading Takeaways

Our brains struggle with 'Prospective Memory'—remembering to do something in the future while busy now. My research shows that chronic stress makes this worse. I designed Jenkins to shift the user from 'Recall' (trying to remember) to 'Recognition' (seeing a prompt), which lowers the mental effort needed to stay in touch.

Sources

Byyny RL. Information and cognitive overload: How much is too much? Pharos Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Med Soc. 2016 Autumn;79(4):2-7. PMID: 29481015.

Cantarella, G et al. “Prospective memory: the combined impact of cognitive load and task focality.” Brain structure & function vol. 228,6 (2023): 1425-1441. doi:10.1007/s00429-023-02658-3

Rice M, Hansen M, Thomas ML and Davalos D (2024) Neural correlates of prospective memory in
college students with anxiety. Front. Psychol. 15:1430373. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1430373

Chen, Jierong et al. "An Effect of Chronic Stress on Prospective Memory via Alteration of
Resting-State Hippocampal Subregion Functional Connectivity." Scientific reports vol. 9,1 19698. 23 Dec. 2019, doi:10.1038/s41598-019-56111-9

Keywords From Readings

Prospective Memory (PM): Remembering to do things in the future.

* Little stress can help with PM, but chronic stress drastically decreases the PM performance. Busy students with high state anxiety, showed very low levels of PM performance. *

Cognitive Load: The mental effort used to process information.

Chronic Stress: Long-term, ongoing stress.

Intention Retrieval: Recalling what you planned to do.

State Anxiety: Temporary nervousness in a situation.

Intention Offloading: Using tools or cues to remember tasks.

* Recommendations were to create an environment that would promote the use of recognition rather than recall. *

Information Overload: Too much information to process effectively.

Multitasking Myth: The false belief we can focus on tasks equally at once.

* Multitasking is dividing focus into separate tasks, and slows down progress. *

Mindsets & States

Mindsets: Relational Responsibility
They value their professional and personal reputation deeply. They believe that "responsiveness equals reliability" and feel a strong sense of duty to their network.

Day-To-Day Mental States: Persistent Guilt & Hyper-Vigilance
During the journey, they fluctuate between "Avoiding" (due to being overwhelmed) and "Panicked Searching" (when they remember a missed message). This leads to a state of low-level chronic anxiety

Psychographics

Values
High achievement, career growth, and deep personal loyalty.

Attitude
Tech-reliant but tech-exhausted. They see their smartphone as both a vital tool and a source of constant "demand" on their time. 

Motivations & Goals

Relational Integrity
Maintaining "social capital" by never letting a high-stakes thread go cold.

Cognitive Efficiency
Achieving a "Clear Mind" state where they can focus on deep work without the nagging feeling that they've forgotten someone.

Opportunity Capture
Ensuring that time-sensitive professional prospects (like job offers) are acted upon immediately.

Thoughts & Feelings

Thinking
"I’ll definitely remember to do this at 5:00 PM when I'm home." (Overestimating future memory).

Feeling
"Digital Drowning." A heavy sense of guilt when seeing a 3-day-old message from a loved one or a recruiter.

Behaviors & Patterns

App Juggling
Rapidly switching between 3+ messaging ecosystems (SMS, Work Email, Personal IM).

Passive Interaction
They see a notification, process its importance, but "store" it in their short-term memory rather than acting, leading to Intention Decay.

Manual Workarounds
Taking screenshots or leaving notifications unread as a primitive way to "offload" memory.

Market Research

Existing solutions are limited—email plug-ins exist, messaging apps require manual work, calls have no support, and OS automations are effort-heavy.

Email: Tools like FollowUp, Boomerang, and Mailbutler remind you of unanswered emails.

Messaging: Most apps need Apple Reminders; only Telegram offers reminders, but manually.

Phone Calls: No solutions exist.

OS-Specific: iOS Shortcuts/Android Routines allow manual automations.

Brainstorm Potential Features

The mindmaps were made to brainstorm potential features.

First Mindmap - shows a broad features ranging from various use cases, operating systems, technology device, ideas needed to be researched.

Second Mindmap - shows the MVP features ranging from user flows, further research details. 

Legend
O cannot be done
O requires further research 
O for MVP

Visual Inspiration Board

My Jenkins UI design is inspired by images highlighting organization through shapes, lines, colors, and typography.

The keywords that inspirated my inspiration board: High Contrast, Accessible, Bento Box, Organized

Content Funnel Approach

Content follows a funnel approach: general on the homepage, more detail on the messages page, and specific app-based messages last.

Homepage: General overview
Messages Page: More detail
App Messages: Specific conversations

Participant Feedback

3/3 participants loved the funnel approach from general to detailed calling it 'natural,'

UI Consistency Across Apps

Colors match app icons for consistency. AI notifications are presented neatly with a 'Bento Box' layout.

Custom Settings

Automatic and Tailored

Users can customize notification frequency or choose immediate reminders, addressing issues of bad timing or forgotten messages.

Based on feedback, reminders now track frequency after the initial message per hour, not total per hour.

Lo-Fi Feedback

“My meetings tend to be long, I wouldn’t want to be bothered multiple times per hour on non-work related things.”

3/3 felt summaries were useful but wanted them slightly longer.

Participants

I tested my design with participants who matched my personas—busy individuals who often overlook notifications do to other responsibilities. 

All participants names have been replaced with a random letter.

Participant D

Occupation: Data Science Manager

Technology Knowledge: High

Participant F

Occupation: Full Time Student

Technology Knowledge: Medium

Participant T

Occupation: Community Center Event Organizer

Technology Knowledge: Low

Usability Test

All usability tests were conducted on Zoom with consent to use cameras, record screens, and sessions for later observation.

Scenario 1: “You just finished a day with back-to-back [meetings, classes, discussions] and want to quickly get caught up on any important messages and message them back.”

Scenario 2: “After a long day, you JUST remembered the notification from an [Apple recruiter, colleague, team member for class]. Find it.”

Scenario 3: “You want to set your close friend Omar as an important sender for Whatsapp in Jenkins. How would you do that?” 

Post Usability Test Questions

1. On a scale of 1 (never use) - 5 (would download it now), what would you rate this design?

• 3
• 4
• 5
  

2. What do you think this design needs to make it even better?

• "A way to know when a message has arrived. A way to order messages because it seems like it's missing."
• "A sort of widget would be nice."
• "Overall it's really good, but I had trouble adding someone as important. Maybe a way to make that faster."
  
  
  

3. "What do you tend to do to remind yourself to return back to people?"

• "I don't have a method, I just remember it. All of my devices are connected, when I receive a notification and it's important, I drop everything and deal with it." 
• "I tend to see messages on my lockscreen at the wrong times, so 1 immediately take a screenshot of it."
• "I write it in the small notebook that I carry with me."

Results + Updates

Although all tasks were completed, participants faced issues. I prioritized message delivery and “important sender” problems due to time limits.

✖ 2/3 wondered about the order of messages
✖ 2/3 seemed bothered in going to the chat source. 
✖ 2/3 asked "When did this message come?"
✖ 2/3 took longer than expected to add an "important sender"

Message Recency

Recent messages appear at the top with timestamps.

Message Time

Each contact shows the last message time.

Quick Add Contact

A bottom-right button lets users mark contacts as important.