Web Portfolio
Turtle Life
from overwhelmed
to in control.
A mobile task management app that helps college students prioritize and follow through on their academic responsibilities powered by AI scheduling.
A mobile task management app that helps college students prioritize and follow through on their academic responsibilities powered by AI scheduling.
College students are often blindsided by the intensity of coursework and the difficulty of balancing academic deadlines with everyday responsibilities. Despite access to many productivity tools, they consistently fall behind not because they lack motivation. Existing tools just don't help them prioritize.
College students juggling coursework, part-time jobs, clubs, and personal responsibilities especially those adjusting to university life for the first time.
Poor task management leads to procrastination, missed deadlines, and extended time to graduation and that has real academic and financial consequences.
Notion requires extensive setup. Google Calendar doesn’t help with priorities. Canvas only shows deadlines. None of these tools tell students what to do next. They just list what needs to be done.
“How might college students effectively prioritize and track their academic tasks in one place so that they can reduce procrastination and stay on top of their coursework without feeling overwhelmed?”
We tested a low-fidelity paper prototype with two different peer groups to identify consistent pain points before investing in high-fidelity design.
Walk through onboarding, add tasks across categories, identify today’s top priority, navigate to weekly review.
We ran the same tasks with a different group to confirm whether pain points were consistent or user-specific.
Our design choices were driven by feedback, testing, and research not assumptions.
Our original question covered academics, health, and daily planning. Instructor feedback identified this as too broad. Narrowing to academic task prioritization made every subsequent decision clearer.
Both test groups independently said they wanted the app to plan for them. Research on procrastination shows the barrier is often cognitive overload at the planning stage. The AI week plan feature directly addresses this.
A flat list of 20 tasks creates the same paralysis as no list at all. The tiered system (Start Here, Later Today, Optional) means students immediately know what to focus on without having to decide for themselves.
Both test groups got stuck at the setup screen. We redesigned onboarding to get users to value faster. Google sign-in, enter a name, done. Setup friction was identified as the primary reason students abandon productivity apps.
Research on procrastination shows tasks feel more manageable when broken into smaller steps. Each task can be broken into subtasks, so large assignments feel approachable rather than overwhelming.
Turtle Life combines task organization, AI-powered scheduling, and smart prioritization in one centralized platform built for students.
Everything at a glance progress ring, tasks in motion, and all task groups in one place. The “Open Chatbot” button surfaces Nemo, the AI scheduling assistant, from the home screen. No app switching. No guessing.
Nemo is Turtle Life’s built-in AI chatbot. Ask it to plan your day, break down a task, or focus on what matters most. It responds with a schedule built around your deadlines, classes, and habits.
Canvas, Google Calendar, and Email all sync automatically. The calendar shows the full week with color-coded assignments, deadlines, classes, and habits. Adding a new task takes 30 seconds. Name, category, date, priority, save. The AI updates your plan automatically.
More screens
From first launch to daily use.
The biggest lesson was that narrowing our focus made everything better. Once we committed to academic task prioritization specifically, our design decisions became clearer and more intentional.
Our instructor’s early feedback that our design question was too broad forced us to refocus. That one change made everything downstream clearer. Usability testing confirmed both groups hit the same wall at onboarding, which confirmed it was a design problem, not a user issue.
Scope creep was our biggest enemy. Every new feature seemed reasonable on its own, but together they made the core experience muddier. Cutting ideas that didn't serve the main problem was honestly harder than building the app.
Students don’t abandon apps because they lack motivation they quit because the setup is too much work upfront. If someone has to do too much before seeing why it's useful, they're gone. That finding drove both the onboarding redesign and the AI scheduling feature.
We’d properly test the AI scheduling feature specifically whether students trust auto-generated schedules. We’d also run a longitudinal study to measure behavior change over two to four weeks, not just usability in a single session.
Here's an honest look at what Turtle Life doesn't do yet, and where it could go.
The AI scheduling feature exists as a concept. We haven’t tested whether students trust auto-generated plans or how they respond when the schedule doesn’t match their preferences.
The app only works if students keep their tasks updated. The students who most need help are also least likely to maintain that habit.
Procrastination is sometimes rooted in anxiety or burnout, not just poor planning. Turtle Life doesn’t address the emotional side of student life a future version should.
The next version would learn a student’s patterns and proactively surface the right task at the right moment less of a tool you open and more of a system that quietly keeps you on track.
A shared task group feature would let teams stay coordinated without switching to yet another app.
A lightweight widget showing just the top three tasks would reduce friction even further check what's next without opening the full app.