Leaf-it — Get it done together.

Inspiration

We’ve all been there. It’s Sunday night, you have three assignments due, a test to study for, and somehow you’ve spent the last two hours telling yourself to start but doing absolutely nothing. Starting alone is hard. But the second a friend sits down next to you, suddenly you’re motivated to start working.

That’s what Leaf-it is built on. The moments when people actually get things done aren’t when they have the perfect planner or the most organized system. They’re when someone else is there with them to motivate and keep them accountable. Clarity doesn’t always come from better tools, sometimes it comes from other people.

Leaf-it takes the chaos of scattered responsibilities and group accountability and turns it into something simple and shared. Not a dashboard, not another notification, just a living pet your whole group can see and take care of together. One look at the pet and you know exactly where everyone stands.

What it does

Leaf-it is a group accountability and productivity app where you and your friends stay on top of your tasks together through a shared pet. To get started, you set up your personal profile, create or join a group, and begin adding your tasks. Each task gets rated on a scale of 1 to 5 stars based on the difficulty and how much effort it takes. A simple daily task such as going on a morning jog would equate to one star while a week-long project would be five. This rating determines how much the task affects the pet’s health, recognizing effort fairly across the group.

Every task your group completes feeds into the pet’s health. Complete your tasks, and the pet gains HP. Miss one, miss one, and it takes a hit. The stars keep the impact proportional, so a five-star midterm and a one-star errand don’t weigh into its health the same way. As tasks go unfinished and deadlines slip, the pet visually deteriorates for the whole group to see. Continue to allow tasks to pile up long enough, and the pet will die. But the pet always revives, giving the group a fresh start and a reminder of what happens when things slip.

To keep the group from slacking, you can nudge anyone who’s falling behind, sending them a push notification. It’s a simple way to look out for each other to keep the pet alive — because in Leaf-it, the pet is only as healthy as the effort everyone puts in together.

How we built it

Leaf-it was designed using Notability, Gemini, and most importantly, Figma. We started with Notability to sketch out our earliest ideas, rough drawings of the pet, potential accessories for your profile, and visual concepts of how the pet's mood would change as its health depleted.

Gemini supported our ideation phase, helping us think of possible project ideas along with early concepts such as the due date feature and nudge mechanic. From there, we moved design decisions to Figma where we built everything from wireframes to an interactive prototype.

We started with user research, conducting a questionnaire asking about doom-scrolling, finishing tasks, friend accountability, and more. We then conducted a few user interviews for more specific research. Almost everyone we spoke to said they work significantly better when they’re around friends. Whether it’s a study session at the library, a friend on FaceTime while they do homework, or just someone checking in to ask if they finished yet, the presence of other people made the difference. From this, we built three personas representing the range of people using the app. One full-time worker is squeezing tasks into a packed schedule, a student with unpredictable hours, and the group member who tends to slack off.

From this, we went from wireframes to low-fidelity to high-fidelity designs, starting with onboarding. This consisted of a welcome, name input, accessory equipment, a new or join group choice, and a group entry page. Next was the core loop with a homepage, personal profile, and a friend profile. The star rating system and due dates were built directly into the task creation flow.

Key features include:

An onboarding process that allows you to customize your character and either create or join a group.

A home screen where your pet reacts depending on how productive the group is with their tasks.

A 1 to 5 star rating system, so a five-star final project and a one-star discussion post don’t affect the pet the same way, keeping it fair.

A nudge button on every friend’s profile page that sends a direct notification when someone needs a push.

A profile page with task history and app data, such as total tasks completed, progress for the day, and streak.

Challenges We Faced

Our biggest challenge was stopping ourselves from overbuilding. Our first instinct was to have the app sync with Google Calendar and connect to Canvas so that tasks would be automatically added. We kept adding features because each one made sense on paper. But every time we added a new feature, we had to think whether it was actually necessary for the app. We had to keep cutting until what was left was something we’d actually open every day ourselves.

Accomplishments that We’re Proud Of

Leaf-it actually solves something we personally deal with every day. This wasn’t a hypothetical user problem. We built it for ourselves and our friends. We’re proud that we took something genuinely chaotic, the stress of assignments and deadlines, and distilled it into something as simple and clear as checking on a pet. We constantly had to consider the balance between fun and functionality, something that users can use because they want to and for productive reasons.

On top of that, this was all of our first times using Figma. Coming in as complete beginners and walking out with a fully designed, cohesive app is something we’re genuinely proud of.

What we learned

We learned that the best version of any idea is usually the simplest one, and getting there means being willing to cut things you worked hard on. Our group went through a long ideation process, which involved sharing many ideas that ended up going nowhere. Even after deciding on an app, we had to undergo a process of choosing which features to keep and which ones weren’t feasible.