Reduce No of Pages in app / friction when setting a timer

[Mike R]

App shortcuts / quick setting tiles will help with this but the reality is the flow in the app could be smoother and have less friction. I'm tired so I won't double check but I believe there are, at least, the following pages/page types:

• Initial page (list of timer types)
• Individual timer edit page (*see note below)
• Some sort of timer list page with bottom mediabar
• Settings page with a single setting
• * When it comes to the ‘custom' timer and one or two others there are even two additional pages to 'edit segment’and 'edit interval’.

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In addition to trying to reduce the number of screens in the app, I would also recommend a few general items:

(1) The list of timer types (if it stays as a list) should be in order from simplest to most complex. Currently it appears to be the opposite.

(2) Users should be able to easily access recent timers or saved timer routines instead of having the app open to the list of timer types each time

(3) For better UX, the direction/type of transition between pages should be indicative of the relationship of the pages (ideally, the app would have as few pages as possible though)

(4) Input boxes should take into account the type of data they accept. i.e. if they are asking for a duration, the user input method should reflect that with a time selector UI vs the keyboard

(5) Doesn't belong here per say but, currently, if the user enters some data in the timer creation page but then backs out instead of submitting, when they go to create a timer again, the data shown reflects the last (abandoned) data vs the last submitted data. This may very well be intentional, however I found it unexpected so I thought I'd note it.

[Devin Rodriguez]

I’ve taken items 1, 2, and 5 and broken them up into #17, #18, and #20, respectively.

Item 3 is a longer term item that will be covered through multiple issues for improving the overall app, starting with issue #19.

The time selector is a bit more of a difficult issue but I have created #21 for it. The TimePicker that Android comes with is built for selecting hour and minute marks, while the timers are more focused around minute and second. Normally I would just use the same dialog and mask the values, but the TimePicker is limited to either 12 or 24 hours for the first segment, and I would like to be able to have users select up to 59 minutes.

Having said all that, I’m closing this issue in favor of the more specific issues, if you’d like to comment on those further I’d be happy to continue discussing ideas on those.

[Mike R]

Yeah, apologies for the verbose writing / not sticking to a single issue. I partially blame that on the fact that I wrote it all of that on my phone where editing + cutting and pasting into multiple issues can be a bit of a hassle. Thanks for the responses :)

[Devin Rodriguez]

No worries, always glad to get feedback. I usually do something pretty similar and just write the stream of thought and edit it up later.