Narrowing our Project Scope. 🤏
Insights from our primary research and a quick brainstorm session led us to focus on a solution that could include tools and resources to help students manage their time effectively and stay on top of their deadlines in order to better socialize with peers. This could help prevent procrastination, reduce stress and alleviate feelings of loneliness and isolation; thus tackling the issue of student burnout.
We began to draw from research articles on the topic of COVID-19 impacts on students to further validate the direction we were moving in. We stumbled upon a research study from the BMC Public Health Journal that interviewed 3000 participants
- this further validated the direction our project was taking:62%
had agreed education
quality declined
50%
developed feelings of
loneliness & depression
56%
lost motivation to keep
up with school work
The competition had NO organizational aspect. 🗃
We conducted a competitive analysis to help identify common trends in apps that dealt with staying connected with peers during isolation. We found that almost none of them had a way to easily plan interactions around a user's already existing schedule. This became the opportunity for our solution.
Fabriq
Asana
Friendly Reminder
Calendy
Understanding our Users. 👀
After conducting a competitor analysis and identifying the gap, we focused on gaining a better understanding of our users. To achieve this, we created personas and an empathy map as part of our app's design process. This helped us gain a deeper insight into our users needs and pain points, which in turn helped us identify important necessary features for our product.
Let's get to building. 🏗️
Our research identified the following features were necessary to address the pain points of student burnout:
1. A simpler way for students to arrange social interactions.
2. A way to mange a school tasks in order to have downtime to relax.
3. A way to be accountable for deadlines and assignments.
User Flow
We mapped out how a user might navigate through the apps pages and actions.
After analyzing our user flow and research, we developed low-fidelity wireframes to help us map out our solution and iterate before developing a final design.
Using a style tile helped us maintain consistency across all screens, which was essential given the time constraints of the hackathon. With a style tile, each designer could make edits without worrying about disrupting the overall design flow.
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Interacting with peers is the key. 🔑
The following features address the research pain points that lead to student burnout.
Plan hangouts around your busy schedule.
- Cooldown suggests free time for hangouts based on your schedule
- Students can schedule group calls to avoid feeling isolated and a loss of motivation
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A schedule made for you.
- Automatically integrate class/assignment dates into your calendar
- Calendar schedule allows students to easily stay on top of assignments to avoid missing deadlines
Be Accountable for deadlines.
- Cooldown keeps you on track by reminding users of upcoming deadlines
- Reminders come with suggestions to when a user should begin studying/preparing
If we had more resources/time... 🤔
Our project was on a hackathon timeline which meant our team couldn't fully follow the Double Diamond process. If we had more time, I would revisit and repeat some of the steps to refine and develop the solution.
Discover 👁
• more time spent conducting research
• analyze data to identify trends and patterns
• brainstorming sessions to generate more ideas/insights
Define 📖
• conduct ideation sessions to generate a wide range of potential solutions
• prioritize potential solutions based on feasibility,desirability, and viability
Develop 🧪
• test low fidelity mockup
• understand key features/interactions
• create high fidelity prototype to test with large user group
Deliver 💥
• conduct user testing sessions to gather feedback and iterate on the design
Thanks for Reading! Check out some of my other projects
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