Deputy is a macOS productivity assistant application we set out to build. We wanted it to act as a hub for your notes, meetings, apps, and let you create shortcuts. It was a huge project so we had to take it one step at a time.
These were some of my initial notes. I had some idea of how the application should be laid out.
These were some of the earliest concepts created. We wanted it to have a friendly feeling. but some of these more colourful UIs were just too colourful and distracting.
These were some more notes I created during this process.
All of these were concepts for the many functionalities we wanted Deputy to have. At this point the visuals weren’t locked in so we were just experimenting with how things would actually work.
An old concept for how it would look when you use voice. We wanted Deputy to work easily with voice along with being able to type to use it.
We felt at this point that we weren’t happy with the layout we had created so we tried to see if we could change it.
We wanted to add your daily calendar view to the application and toyed with the idea of adding your to-do list to the default view. At this point we felt that the visuals were too dark and we needed to refine them.
We really liked the idea of being able to filter out your search within the UI. Deputy needed some way of separating out some of its functions like notes and to-dos. This seemed like a good solution to our problems.
We tried to use up more space on the page at this point. We could have widgets to show you your tasks in your integrated apps such as Trello and Asana. This was getting closer to what we wanted Deputy to be.
The visual style was starting to come together at this point. This was an iteration where we were figuring out if we could have Deputy time block your tasks for you.
We needed to narrow down what features we would launch with at this point and design and polish those. We concluded a round of user research and the features below are some of the ones we would have launched with.
default view
As you can see the visuals got refined a bit more. We also added an info bar at the bottom of the search to show you how to navigate the menus.
Of course we had to include a dark mode.
email integration
Explaining how the context menu works after you connect your email.
Searching for a name in Deputy and having email options.
shortcuts
We decided that the best place to have the shortcuts was in the preferences panel. These would allow you to say or type one phrase and chain several events to happen at the same time.
If you already have created some shortcuts this is what it would look like.
The UI for creating a new shortcut.
Thought it would be a nice touch to let users pick the icon to represent their shortcut. The idea was to be able to upload your own to add more customisation.
System controls
Deputy is able to do some basic system controls.
preferences panel
We thought it might be useful to have somewhere to show people the possible commands they can use with Deputy.
