As the apps I have mostly researched so far have something to do with productivity, I looked up people’s interest in it over time for the past 5 years in the UK. Interestingly, the search for it on Google spiked massively around 2026, which may imply that people could be having issues on productivity around that time.
I broadened my search to worldwide and saw a similar trend, with the data spiking around February 2026. However, I realised that the search “productivity” may be too broad as it could include business-related productivity rather than productivity that it more personal.
I did another search, this time to see anything that has to do with smart watch apps for productivity.
The red bar here represents the search for “smart watch”, and what is interesting about this is how it also followed the same trend for “productivity”. This means whatever happened around February 2026 could have had an impact on people’s experiences with their smart watches not long after.
I added a final search for “to do list” on Google Trends represented in yellow, and also found that it followed a similar trend. I became quite curious about the data I was seeing, so I did some searching online to find out what exactly happened during that time. That was when I came across what I had researched prior to this — Ramble was released officially on the Todoist app in January 2026.
I wanted to see how users of Todoist experienced Ramble and their issues about it so that I can have some grounds to work on when it comes to my smart watch app idea. A lot of these issues were found from Reddit where people were discussing about it in a subreddit called r/todoist.
One of the main ones I found were that people were experiencing issues with how the AI interprets words and phrases, which would make it create tasks that made no sense to the user. Apparently, it could only understand a particular way of speaking at the time, so users have very conflicting experiences with the AI. (https://tinyurl.com/yt578y3f)
To better help me in defining what I needed to do for the app screens, I came up with a few user stories that would help me in designing certain elements for the screens.
These user stories mostly came from my research on other users’ experiences with apps like Todoist, as well as some of my own peers’ experiences.