FORGETMENOT APP
[ Personal Project ]
About
ForgetMeNot is a conceptual productivity app designed to make task management more engaging through gamification. The project explores how motivation, habit-building, and rewarding feedback loops can enhance the traditional to-do list experience.
The challenge
Todo apps are very good at helping us record things we need to do.
The problem is that recording a task isn't the same as wanting to complete it.
Traditional productivity apps tend to focus on organisation: lists, priorities, deadlines and reminders. These tools are useful, but they don't necessarily provide much motivation to come back and keep progressing.
For Forgetmenot, I wanted to explore a different question:
What if completing your tasks could feel more like making progress in a game?
The challenge was finding a balance between productivity and playfulness.
The gamification shouldn't distract users from getting things done. It should reinforce the behaviour the product already wants to encourage.
This led to three core design goals:
[1] Make progress visible: Give users a tangible sense that their actions are moving them forward.
[2] Make completion satisfying: Turn the moment of completing a task into a meaningful interaction rather than simply removing an item from a list.
[3] Keep productivity at the center: Gamification should support the todo experience rather than become a game that happens to contain a todo list.
Main screens of the app.
From todo list to progression system
The starting point was the familiar todo-list model:
Create task → Complete task → Task disappears
Forgetmenot introduces another layer:
Create task → Work towards it → Complete task → Receive feedback → Make progress
The important change isn't simply adding rewards: instead of completion being the end of an interaction, it becomes an opportunity to reinforce the user's sense of progress.
Detail of the main screen implementation with the defined color styles in Figma.
Key UX decisions
Designing around progress
One of the challenges was deciding where the gamification should live.
I didn't want users to have to navigate through a separate "game" section every time they completed a task.
Instead, progression became part of the core information architecture.
The experience is organised around four main areas:
- Tasks: the "core" experience where users set their goals and tasks.
- Garden/Stats: areas where the actual progress is shown, to make it feel like a journey.
- Friends: a social engagement engine to foster motivation.
- Profile: all the non-gamification, boring stuff.
Completion should feel rewarding
In a conventional todo app, checking a task off is almost invisible. For Forgetmenot, I wanted completion to have a small moment of celebration.
The reward doesn't need to be huge. Even a small animation, progress increase or visual change can make completion feel more tangible.
Make progress visual
Progress is much easier to understand when users can see it. Rather than relying exclusively on numerical statistics, I explored visual representations of progression (the garden) that make the user's activity feel tangible. This is where the product's visual language and gamification system come together.
Some additional content as shown in Figma's Preview mode.
A retrospective
Forgetmenot made me think about gamification less as a collection of mechanics and more as a UX feedback system.
For Forgetmenot, the most interesting design space was therefore not the reward itself, but the relationship between task completion, feedback and long-term progress. The project also reinforced the importance of keeping the core product experience simple. If users have to understand a complicated game system before they can manage a task, the gamification has failed.
The next step would be to validate whether the gamification actually changes behaviour. I'd particularly want to test:
- Does completion feedback make users more motivated to continue?
- Do users understand the progression system without explanation?
- Which rewards feel meaningful rather than superficial?
- Does gamification encourage users to complete tasks, or simply encourage them to interact with the app?
- Does the system remain motivating after the novelty wears off?