CheckMate is a notification hub that helps product managers collect & manage messages into one page
CheckMate consolidates work communications into a single, easy-to-navigate platform. It’s a private project with a team of myself, a project manager and an engineer developed in collaboration with a product manager and an engineer, and a prototype is currently available for trial.
Problem space
The problem came out organically based on the team’s previous work experiences. Roles like product managers or people managers receive inundated numbers of messages from various work & communication apps (e.g., Slack, Confluence, Figma, Gmail...). In the midst of a busy work schedule, jumping between those channels to check things to do and prioritize them gets overwhelming. There are a lot of productivity apps to tackle this problem, but most of them require users to download them and learn how to use them. The team envisioned a simple but smarter ways to manage and resolve work messages from various channels and stakeholders, and hence designed CheckMate.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
The team explored existing startup products and identified a few apps designed to help users bookmark unread emails and messages from their work channels. After testing these tools, we observed several key takeaways:
Some products focus on simply collecting unread messages or creating to-do lists. These are user-friendly, low-cost solutions.
Other products aim to boost productivity through advanced email organization features, but they come with complex interfaces and a steeper learning curve. These tend to be more expensive.
Both types of products require users to install dedicated apps, which can present a significant mental barrier for those hesitant to adopt new tools.
FOUNDATIONAL INTERVIEW
To better understand the problem's scope and how individuals organize their tasks, the team conducted interviews with eight people in project management or people management roles. The main goals of the foundational interview were 1. to understand the magnitude of organizing unread messages and new tasks and 2. what tools they normally use for task organization. This process led to the identification of several common insights:
All interviewees agreed that not being able to check or manage incoming messages on time is a significant problem.
A few had already developed their own organization mechanism, such as using their work calendar or physical notes to convert messages into tasks.
3 interviewees mentioned using Apple Notes for task management, appreciating the ability to access the same notes across their work laptop, personal laptop, and phone.
While all interested in boosting their productivity, they expressed reluctance to try new productivity apps, citing the hassle of spending time learning how to use them.
Product positioning
It was particularly interesting to us that multiple interviewees mentioned Apple Note, suggesting that real-time sharing of task lists across devices could be a critical success feature for CheckMate. It’s also incredibly simple and easy to use. Calendar apps (Google/Outlook/etc…) were also frequently mentioned by the interviewees. This feedback indicates that our target users prefer straightforward solutions rather than heavy and complex productivity tools. From our foundational explorations and interviews, we have positioned CheckMate with the following characteristics:
INITIAL DESIGN
The team made some hypotheses after the foundational study and reflected some key findings to the initial UX design:
A sidebar panel would be the ideal UI for displaying task lists. With the sidebar UI, users can see the entire list of messages & tasks without leaving their work context.
Users would want to prioritize messages & tasks by who sent them and deadline. Especially, they would want to bump up messages or tasks came from their manager.
Users would want to sort out messages by type of communication channel.
AI could be helpful for ‘smart search’, allowing users to search for messages/tasks by attachment name & type or a specific keyword.
Validation interview
After the initial round of design, I invited several interviewees from the foundational interviews and walked them through our initial product design of CheckMate and to assess its usefulness. During the interview I discovered that some of our hypotheses were incorrect:
Sidebar UI: While users appreciate the ability to have the sidebar UI integrated into their work context, they preferred for viewing their task list in a separate browser or a pop-up widget.
Sorting criteria: For organizing unread messages or tasks, they prefer to categorize them by project and priority. Contrary to our belief, they do not prioritize tasks based on who send them or where the messages come from.
They hoped AI could assist in sorting messages (semi) automatically by comprehending the contextual meaning of the text. They found manually prioritizing them to be cumbersome.
Some also mentioned that the AI could automatically reschedule tasks to a different day if too many tasks are assigned to one day.
DESIGN ITERATION for MVP
I have refined the MVP design to reflect the comprehensive feedback from users and the considerations of technical feasibility. The MVP functions as a floating web application that integrates seamlessly into various work contexts. Users can easily gather unread messages and tasks with CheckMate simply by pasting links from any web-based applications, including Google Suite, Gmail, Figma, and Confluence, among others.
NEXT STEPS
CheckMate is currently in the development phase, with its MVP focusing on delivering the core functionality. The team has outlined key milestones to enhance the feature set before the official launch. Our top priority is addressing a critical usability challenge: optimizing URL handling by shortening links and extracting metadata to display essential details, such as attachment information. Following this, we aim to introduce a mobile app version, enabling users to seamlessly access task lists across multiple devices in real-time.