Challenge

"Design your own desktop app that integrates seamlessly with an individuals’ daily workflow and advocates for mindfulness and productivity."

Defining the Problem

After reading and understanding the challenge brief, I first sought out to define and empathize the problem to give myself direction with the product design.

The user base I decided to target were college and university students because I was a student myself. Given the limited time frame, this would allow me to validate my research based on not only my personal experiences but also my peers' anecdotes about higher-education student life.

To provide myself contextual evidence about the problem of productivity and mindfulness within college students, I came up with 3 research questions:

1) What are the major factors that affects a student's productivity?
2) What factors facilitate motivation within students?
3) How can we encourage mindfulness within students?

Questions Findings

After spending a couple of hours looking through online articles, I found the following answers to my proposed research questions:

1) What are the major factors that affects a college student's productivity?

According to The Distracted Student Mind by Larry D. Rosen, technological distractions are the single most detrimental factor in a student's productivity. There is evidence that states that:

- The typical student is distracted by technologies like phones at least 5 out of every 15 minutes they set aside to study
- Due to the mass amount of media consumption today, student's sub-consicously check their phones whenever a notification alerts them

2) What factors facilitate motivation within college students?

According to Villanova University and Fremont College, there are a variety of factors that play into motivating students:

- Maintaining a positive attitude
- Acknowledging past accomplishments
- Setting flexible schedules and routines
- Prioritizing tasks
- Celebrating incremental successfully
- Taking breaks to rejuvenate the mind

3) How can we encourage mindfulness within college students?

According to A Student Guide to Going Zen, mindfulness is cultivated by:

- Meditation
- Breathing exercises
- Gratitude journaling
- Daily self reflections

Comparative Analysis

After answering the research questions, I analyzed competitors of Studoent, which were: Todoist, Trello, Notion, and Calm. My goal for this comparative analysis was to identify features within these apps that facilitate productivity and mindfulness based on my online research.

Based on the comparative analysis findings, the following were crucial features to implement into Studoent based on competitors features and flaws:

- Task management
- Milestone tracking
- Calendar management
- Prioritizations
- Due date tracking
- Curated dashboard
- Simple user interface
- Customization
- Task categories

Personas

Taking into account the past research data, I created two personas to simplify and remind myself of who I’ll be designing for.

Research Findings

From both the research and personas, I came up with the following core features and sub-features to implement in my designs:

1) Organizational structure

- Dashboard
- Task management (task board view with filters)
- Milestone & Due date tracking
- Calendar management
- Customization

2) Motivational features

- Positive reinforcement
- Acknowledging past accomplishments
- Prioritizing tasks and goals
- Celebrating incremental success

3) Mindfulness features

- Meditation exercises
- Breathing exercises
- Gratitude journal
- Self reflections

4) Preventing distractions

- Advise user to remove distractions
- Motivate users to keep working

Design Goals

The following are my goals for approaching the design of Studoent based off user research and user needs:

1) Side navigation that facilitates easy access to all essential feature categories: Dashboard, Tasks, Classes, Personal, Calendar, Settings, and Relax

2) Motivational sub-features that embodies optimism within the product

3) Intuitive access to the mindfulness features of the app

4) Remind users to remove distractions when starting a task

User Flow

Before beginning the interface design, I decided to map out a simple user flow to demonstrate the features available to the user as they navigate through Studoent.

Mid Fidelity Wireframes

Given the limited timeframe for this project, I chose to jump right into mid fidelity wireframes in order to increase the efficiency of my workflow. Taking into account the user flow, I developed the following screens:

High Fidelity Prototype

Studoent - A college student's best friend

Based on the user research and design methods conducted, the final prototype presents college students a way to organize a productive lifestyle, options to practice mindfulness, and an AI mentor that motivates them. Studoent gives students a means to be productive and mindful, while also fitting seemlessly into their busy lives.

View Interactive Prototype

Alternative Research Methods

Given the time constraint of this competition, I found that I had to be flexible in how I conducted my user research. Though it is standard to conduct user interviews and surveys to collect important data on users, I decided to not use these methods due to the small sample size of data it would give me. Instead, I opted for more qualitative ways of learning about the users, in tackling the problem itself. By defining research questions that I would be able to learn about online, this gave me the opportunity to empathize with college students, and utilize my personal experiences to validate these answers.

Thanks to these research questions, I was able to progress through user research by utilizing the internet once more to look at competitors and how they approach the problem of productivity and mindfulness. By creating personas, I found the opportunity to remedy user needs within the features that Studoent would support. Even though time was limited, I was able to conduct sufficient research to support and guide my design decisions.

Self Critiques

Looking back at Studoent a couple of weeks later, I will find a major critique in my design in terms of both its user experience and user interface as an exercise to learn and grow.

As for the UX, a major problem I see is the fact that there is no incentive for the user to actually engage with the "Relax" function. Even though this option is easily accessible, the user flow is mainly focused on productivity with mindfulness just slotted in there for convenience. A solution to this problem would be to gamify the entire experience for the student. By incorporating a system of earning rewards for utilizing all aspects of the app, the user will have a reason to visit the Relax feature. An example of this solution would be to give users points for each task and mindfulness exercise accomplished, and these points would be used to grant users either more customization options (like themes for the Studoent Mentor) or monetary rewards.

As for the UI, a major problem I found is that my sense of visual hierarchy and sizing was inconsistent and causes the app to look more unappealing than it should be. For one, some screens, like the Dashboard screen, looks crowded due to my lack of whitespace usage. But the Task page had sufficient whitespace, which validates this inconsistency. As a remedy for this, I would want to rethink the sizing of my content "cards", in order to let the design breathe. Additionally, some buttons and text were way too big and took up too much screen real estate. A great example of this would be on the Settings screen, in which the "Enable Desktop Notifications" button was unusually huge compared to all other aspects of the screen. Again, the user interface would look more aesthetic if I incorporated more whitespace and became more consistent with sizing.

Thank you for reading! For reference, I was a top 5 finalist but ultimately didn't win the design-a-thon. These results have given me more motivation to improve upon my design skills! I would love constructive feedback, feel free to reach out to me on any of my contact links!