This part was easy for me as I had experience already using a substantial amount of applications to track time and invoice in the past. In my experience testing applications, the most functional time trackers were part of large and expensive project management applications. As a freelancer spending hundreds of dollars a month on project management isn’t practical. Everything I use needs to be free or cheap. In addition to cost, I have found several free project management apps that work great but just don’t have time tracking and invoicing or lock them behind a paywall. In my search for what other freelancers were using, I found this was a common problem. The only thing that seems to be on the market is a bit too basic, a little confusing, and doesn’t create invoices. So that became my goal, create something freelancers can pair with their favorite no/low cost project management app to track time and invoice.

I wrote list of functions the app should have. then I turned those functions into a journey map that represented all the paths a user could take.

After creating a journey map for users I created wireframes and a low fidelity prototype I could send to friends to try. Feedback was positive and gave me a more opinions on how invoicing should work, like separating active and archived clients.

After tweaking the wireframes and prototype to include helpful feedback, I took to creating the visual design. I wanted the app to be clean and didn’t want much visual noise since the idea was for freelancers to pair it with their favorite project management app. I toyed with the idea of adding simple hand drawn illustrations to the white space but ultimately decided that decorating took away attention to the function and over all purpose of the app.