#AutoPilot Product Plan
###Problem Statement
A series of experiments led by Professor Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota demonstrated that making decisions throughout the day--whether pleasant, difficult, or mundane--wear down a person’s mental energy. Other studies led by Professor Roy Baumeister at Florida State University have shown that depleted mental energy reduces a person’s self-control and ability to make smart decisions throughout the day. Autopilot is an iOS app that helps users reduce the number of decisions they make while performing mundane tasks during the day. Additionally, it allows users to interact with the app from the lockscreen to reduce potential distractions while performing their everyday routines.
###Market Research
Different types of apps exist to help people organize their daily lives and build new habits. Primarily, these types of apps include to do list apps, habit tracking apps, and reminders. While these types of apps can help a user conserve mental energy by reminding them of what they want to accomplish or provide motivation to perform a task, they don’t take the decision making aspect out of everyday routines.
###User Personas
Autopilot’s is target audience is adults and young adults who are fluent with their iPhones. Ideally, they understand how to use lockscreen notifications and widgets.
This app is designed for a two different types of people. Both types of people prefer to use their phones to organize their tasks and their schedules.
The first type is the person who is looking for ways to boost their productivity and understand that ‘routinizing’ mundane tasks can help preserve mental energy for more important tasks. This type of user will appreciate that the app ‘makes the decision’ about which task to perform next so they do not have to waste mental resources on each time they perform something routine.
The other type is person has many tasks to juggle or has many distractions in their daily lives (whether it’s a job with frequent interruptions, a family, or a busy mind). This type of user will appreciate that the app keeps track of where they are in a task so they don’t have to waste time remembering on their own after an interruption.
###Technology Selections
Swift
XCode
Quick (for testing)
SQLite
###Wireframes
Wireframes for this project can be found here.