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.

Literature Review

Reading Takeaways

The brain focuses inward and puts more mental effort into trying to remember many future tasks while working on something irrelevant without noticing its surrounding. The opposite is true when it has to remember a few things.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Information Overload
Too much information to process effectively.

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

Persona - Student

Samantha Miller

Samantha is a part-time barista and full-time law student at NYU in New York City, New York.

"I constantly juggle iMessage, Gmail, and WhatsApp, and often receive messages while I’m studying. I tell myself, “I’ll look at it later,” but then forget to follow up. As a result, I’ve missed both small and significant opportunities—including job prospects—simply because I didn’t respond in time.

I need an app that lifts the mental load of remembering to return back to messages I mark as important. This would reduce the stress and guilt I feel when I forget to reply to someone important—whether it’s a classmate, family member, friend or future job prospects."

Goals

• Stay on top of communication with team members, family, and group projects.
  
• Avoid missing important follow-ups
  
• Reduce mental clutter
  
• Find full time associate position.
  

Behaviors

• Uses many messaging apps (email, SMS, Whatsapp)
  
• Sees notification but forgets to return back to them.
  

Pain Points

• Mental fatigue from juggling too many messages.
• Missed opportunities from potential employers.
• Tools she uses don't effectively prioritize or remind her to follow up.

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.

Homepage Changes

V1

• ‪‪❤︎‬ 3/3 liked having important notifications in one place.
• ✖ ‪‪3/3 were confused when no summaries appeared.
• Overall Feedback - All felt overwhelmed by seeing missed messages without context with one person saying "omg what’s this mess”

V2

• ❤︎‬ 3/3 liked the idea of centralized notifications but rated the current version 2/5.
• 3/3 said the summaries were “too much, too busy, too messy”

V3

• ❤︎ 3/3 loved the funnel approach (general → specific). One noted, “This feels like I have a secretary named Jenkins.”
  
• 3/3 found summaries decent but wanted slightly longer ones.
• 2/3 had 3+ important contacts spread across multiple apps.

FINAL

The final design is based on usability test results (next section).

Specific App Notification Settings Changes

V1

• ✖ 1/3 participants were satisfied with the current length of the summaries. 
• ✖ 2/3 participants thought the summaries were a bit short. 
  • “Can the summaries be more detailed.”
  • “Summaries tend summarize the key ideas or main points as well."
    

V2

• ❤︎ 3/3 liked the idea of centralized notifications but rated the current version 2/5.
• ❤︎ ✖ 3/3 understood and appreciated reminder notifications, but had doubts on the success of it. 
  
  • “My meetings tend to be long, I wouldn’t want to be bothered multiple times per hour on non-work related things.” 
    
  • ”Getting constant notifications per hour while working would be extremely distracting.”  
    When asked about a possible fix, they suggested it to be user controlled somehow. 
    
• 1/3 suggested that the reminder notification tone should be the default application tone 
  • “People would be are used to it (notification tone) and one more less thing to remember.”
• Controlling Reminder Settings
  • 3/3 mentioned it was more natural and effective
    • “made more sense” and believed to be “more effective” in returning back sooner.
  • 3/3 agreed that having customizable AI summary lengths was the “sweet spot”.

FINAL

The final design is based on usability test results (next section).

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

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

On a scale of 1 (never use) - 5 (would download it now), what would you rate this design?
3
4
5

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."

"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.