This part was easy for me, as I already had experience using several applications to track time and generate invoices. From what I had seen, 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 inexpensive. In addition to cost, I have found several free project management apps that work well but lack time tracking and invoicing, or are locked behind a paywall. In my search for what other freelancers were using, I found this to be a common issue. The only thing on the market is too basic, too confusing, and will not create invoices. That became my goal: to 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 visual noise since the idea was for freelancers to pair it with their favorite project management app. I experimented with the idea of adding simple hand-drawn illustrations to the white space, but ultimately decided that decorations took attention away from the function and overall purpose of the app.