A recent-timers widget for iOS, designed end-to-end and shipped to 60% adoption.
Role
Design strategy, UX, UI, research.
Team
Me
PM
EM
BE
What this case study covers
Mobile users couldn’t track time without opening Harvest’s iOS app. We shipped a Home Screen widget that lets them start, stop, and see running timers without launching the app.
Impact
iOS users adding a widget to their Home Screen
60%
Removal rate
~5%
The problem
The fastest action on a time-tracking app required opening the app.
Tracking time on mobile required: unlock phone → find Harvest → wait for app to open → tap timer
The previous (pre-React Native) Harvest app had a widget. The current app didn’t. Users noticed.
Widgets were the #1 most-requested mobile feature on UserVoice
NPS verbatims and App Store reviews surfaced the same theme: “I work in bursts. Fewer taps would make me use this more.”
For a tool whose entire job is to capture time as it happens, the friction was the wrong shape.
Research
How we validated the bet
We didn’t need to discover the demand, we needed to validate the design. Multiple signals pointed in the same direction:
UserVoice analysis: widgets ranked #1 mobile request, with attached MRR signal
NPS + App Store reviews filtered for widget-related sentiment
User interviews: mobile users described the moment they wished they could track without opening the app
The bet
A “Recent Timers” widget, three sizes, one purpose
We scoped to a single widget type rather than chasing the full set we could imagine (favorites, new-timer-only, project-only).
Why “recent timers”
Most users repeat the same handful of timers all week. Surfacing them on the Home Screen meant the most common action (restarting a known timer) could happen in a single tap.
Designed against Apple’s constraints, not around them: widget refresh limits, the HH:MM:SS format requirement, the inability to isolate state changes to a single timer. All of these shaped the visual and interaction design from the start, not as afterthoughts.
iOS: In-app discovery
Making sure users knew the widget existed
iOS: Widget designs
From widget gallery to Home Screen
Android: Designed for parity
Same widget, Android-native
Results
What shipping the widget changed
Adoption (iOS):
60% of iOS mobile users installed a widget
Most installers kept it (removal rate ~5%)
Top mobile feature request resolved
A note on engagement
Widget engagement is hard to measure cleanly. A glance-able UI delivers value precisely without requiring interaction: a user checking that their timer is running on the Home Screen produces no event we can count. The metrics we have (adoption, retention on the Home Screen) suggest the widget earned its place there. Quantifying glance-value remains an open problem.
Reflection
Three lessons:
1. The hardest design decisions on this project were technical, not visual.
Apple’s widget refresh limits, format requirements, and interactivity model shaped what could and couldn’t be done. Working with those constraints from day one produced a tighter design than trying to disguise them later would have.
2. Discovery is part of design.
A widget no one finds is a feature no one uses. The in-app banner and Account-tab section were as critical to 60% adoption as the widget itself was.
3. Glance-able UIs need a different evaluation model.
Standard engagement metrics don’t capture the value of a UI that delivers information without interaction. Worth thinking about how product teams measure passive utility.
Appendix
Technical reference
A short summary of the platform constraints that shaped the design (Apple refresh rates, format limitations, push notification architecture, Live Activities groundwork), captured in a reference doc maintained alongside the design files.
Survey program
A user-satisfaction survey ran post-launch (242 responses) to inform iteration priorities. Findings fed into the Android design and a backlog of iOS improvements.
