Many students struggle with meeting academic deadlines and lack productivity, leading to poor academic performance

Students struggle with managing their workload, juggling multiple classes and assignments, leading to stress and poor productivity. Time management and procrastination issues also cause missed deadlines.

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Research Process

The research process involved conducting semi-structured interviews with 10 UofT undergraduate and graduate students aged 18-25 to investigate the current schedule management and reminder tools available, usage patterns, and challenges faced.

The interviews were analyzed to draw conclusions about the state of schedule management and reminder tools used by UofT students. If you are interested in learning about my research process, please visit here

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Findings

1. Peer pressure in increasing academic motivation

While students found that they sometimes have lower motivation on starting the academic tasks, 70% of interviewees suggested that seeing their peers working hard and achieving academic success can motivate them to work harder and strive for similar success.

2. Lack of synchronization

50% of the interviewees have expressed a complaint that they forget tasks because the due dates from Quercus, the UofT course management platform, cannot be directly imported into their accustomed calendar.

3. Ineffective reminders

30% of interviewees states that even though the task was added to the calendar, the reminder is not obvious and effective enough to remind them.

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Personas

I noticed that there were two targeted user groups I needed to serve. Alice, who tends to forget about the academic tasks, and Jason, who is easily distracted during their study time and having a low productivity.

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Competitive Analysis

There is currently no comprehensive tool that offers UofT students automatic synchronization and reminders for academic deadlines, while also helping to increase productivity.

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Design Goal ✨

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Design Concept: A solution that offers auto-synchronized academic task reminder groups and promoting mutual supervision between students.

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Intended Outcomes

User goal 1: Be less forgetful and stay on top of her academic responsibilities -> Stay on track with their tasks in a more organized way

User goal 2: Focus on the academic tasks and complete them efficiently -> Offer insights into how others are managing their academic responsibilities & Provide a dedicated space for studying with classmates

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Three versions of designs were created and two rounds of usability tests were conducted to optimize the solution, here are some of major changes we made:

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What's Next?

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1. More iterations to measure success

Since I made some assumptions while I creating the final design and I'm not sure how user would feel, I would conduct another user testing to see whether the app is impactful and can satisfy real user needs.

( I feel it's better than before. Unfortunately, I cannot represent the users, so I need to figure out 😏)

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2. Drive usage and adoption

Forming an initial community in this app is an important aspect, because there must be users in order to remind other users.

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1. Be an active thinker

The high-fidelity prototypes was created a few months later after this project ended. When I came back and re-think some of the design decisions we made, I found conflicts between features and user mental model, and I was able to find ways to improve my design. Never stop reflecting and make improvements!

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2. Prioritization

It's easy to come up ideas, but it's more important to prioritize those that would bring values to users and make it a meaningful product.

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Something I want to improve:

1. Enrich the "Dashboard" feature 🤔

Currently, the dashboard only has limited and essential information to display. I want to add more useful information to the dashboard to make it more comprehensive and useful for users, such as displaying the due dates, showing reminder and encouraging messages before the task due date etc. -- Apply Emotional Design!

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2. Being able to manage multiple user pain points 🚩

Despite this app is able to fulfill the user needs we discovered during the research process, I felt a bit overwhelming of having to solve 2 major user pain points at the same time (forgetfulness and low productivity). I'm constantly learning and growing, hopefully in the next project, I will be able to make better and more feasible design decisions.

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