Fig Tree Notes App

Problem

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree…I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest.” — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

As a young adult, Sylvia Plath’s fig tree dilemma often emerges: when choosing a path — a major, career, passion — the other possibilities and ideas seem to wither away.

But the branches of life we don’t pursue don’t actually disappear. They simply have nowhere to grow.

Concept

Productivity Redefined: Let Your Ideas Ripen

Fig Tree is a platform where no idea has to die for another to live. Inspired by Sylvia Plath’s Fig Tree analogy, users grow ideas as “figments” across three states: unripe, ripening, and ripe.

Productivity tools today often assist with project execution rather than exploration. Figment states encourage you to think through every idea in progress and allows them come to fruition. Every idea has a home on your fig tree, no matter how formed or unformed it is.

Grow Each Branch of Your Life

Organize your ideas from big to small. All large ideas exist under your Orchard of Ideas. Once you have an idea, plant a new fig tree in the orchard and plant as many figments as you would like. Within each fig tree, you can also grow a sub-branch of figments for more granular ideas.

Challenges

Make Idea Generation Low-Stakes

When an idea is not fully formed, we often feel like it is not worth writing down. Fig Tree needed to limit the amount of barriers between an idea in one’s head and the act of beginning to develop it.

Track “In-Between” Idea States

There’s often more nuance to an idea than “unfinished” versus “finished”. There needed to be a way to track ideas that were a work in progress, encouraging users to embrace the developmental stage of a concept.

Organize Complex Threads of Ideas

Work-in-progress ideas can get chaotic. Fig Tree needed to organize them simply while accommodating complex ideas.

Design Highlights

Orchard

Each user has an Orchard of Ideas with unlimited space to create new trees, where they can begin growing figments. Trees can (and should!) range across all different topics: majors, art ideas, music, recipes to cook…

Seamlessly Begin Growing A Figment

Within each tree, users can easily begin growing new figments. Figments can be as detailed or low-commitment as a user prefers: they can easily jot down notes or add pictures, and set the state of the idea to unripe, ripening, or ripe.

Figment states + Tracker

An unripe figment represents a newly formed idea. A ripening figment represents an idea in progress. A ripe figment represents an idea ready for action. Users can simply click on a figment and change its state if progress level on an idea changes. A tracking bar at the bottom of each tree that counts the number of figments in each state.

Grow a Sub-branch in an Existing Figment

Fig Tree accommodates big and small ideas. A figment that needs more organization can utilize the sub-branch feature, which allows a user to grow another set of figments within an existing one.

Reflection: What I Learned

1. Importance of design systems:Creating a system to organize complex ideas was a major challenge in this project. It forced me to think about design on a broader scale and how each feature would contribute to the large picture of laying out the contents of one’s mind.
2. Philosophical Backbone: Having a strong purpose for a product is extremely important. The fig tree metaphor is a main differentiator of this productivity app than anything else, and I felt compelled to stick to its philosophy once I established that as the backbone.