About the project
Time Man is a mobile application that helps us address the design question, “how can we help college students efficiently organize their time as well as improve their time management skills?” by enabling college students to organize assignments, events, and study groups using integration with Canvas, Google calendars, and other work tools.
Timeframe
2019.03 - 2019.06
Collaborators
Ziyue Li: UX Researcher/Designer & UI Designer
Xin Gao: UX Researcher/Designer & UI Designer
Andrew Hu: UX Researcher/Designer & Web Programmer
Jacob Miller: UX Researcher/Designer & Web Programmer
Skills
Survey
Semi-structured Interview
Information architecture
User-Centered Design
Usability Testing
Tools
Miro, Figma, Adobe XD
Background and Goals
It is a serious problem that the majority of college students have poor time management skills. From freshmen who have not experienced the free college life to seniors who are overwhelmed by the impending pressure from the real world, college students often experience stress and anxiety caused by poor time management skills.
College life is beautiful, but it is not easy for students to keep track of the increased workload, social commitments, and for many work hours. Managing their works can be particularly difficult. Their busy and chaotic schedules cause a lot of stress. Students are required to use many different tools, such as calendars, to-do lists, Canvas, and etc to manage their time effectively. However, there is a lot of unnecessary work in manually copying and updating data between all of these tools and it’s possible to make mistakes, leading to disorganization and missed assignments.
Our goal with this project is to make this process easier and less stressful for college students to manage their time and provide a less intrusive way to incentivize them keep on track of their tasks/assignments.
UX Research Process
Survey
Participants criteria
college students
particularly interested in freshman, and those who have trouble in managing their time in college
Executive Summary
We sent out our survey using Google surveys and post the survey in our friend circles.
Our main goals were to understand the participants’ workflows, so that we could augment their current efforts and reduce or eliminate the tasks that are difficult for the users as opposed to what most time management apps do.
Key takeaways
We found that many current apps force the user to manage their time the way the designers/developers believe they should rather than the way that people actually do.
the majority of students do not plan more than 1–2 days in advance.
being “too pushy” is one reason why students stop using the time management apps
Semi-structured Interviews
Participants
4 undergraduate UW college students
Executive Summary
Our interview questions were designed around how they plan their schedule and their past experiences with time management tools, including characteristics, challenges and desires.
Key takeaways
students generally use a combination of Canvas plus a calendar and/or a to-do list to effectively manage their time.
many students use study groups as a way to increase their productivity and collaborate on assignments.
Based on our collected data from surveys and interviews, we identify three main tasks that our app needs to achieve
Planning and visualizing the schedule with a smart calendar
Prioritizing tasks with a to-do list
Forming/finding study groups.
Also, there are four main constraints that we need to consider during design
The tool should not require large amounts of time or effort to use effectively.
The tool should not be annoying or invasive.
The tool should be accessible and allows for social learning.
The tool should integrate seamlessly with the tool students already use.
UX Design Process
Heuristic Analysis
Our initial design ideas had undergone major alterations and refinements through the heuristic analysis from classmates.
Change of UI: To increase the visibility of the systems state and provide more information to the user, we highlighted the tab at the bottom that represents the current tab, calendar, tasks, and Study Together, and we added small temporary pop-ups to notify the users that they successfully added a task to their task list or calendar or joined or created a study group.
Usability Testing
increase flexibility: our users want to see daily view of the calendar and be able to plan their day with easily dragging interaction from tasks to calendar
“study together” feature could be further integrated with other components in the app.
Hi-fi Mockup
When we transitioned from the paper prototype to the digital mockup we kept most of the elements from our prototype the same. There were obvious improvements to layouts and color schemes but the key functionality and appearance were mostly unchanged. There were two main changes. The changes are based on feedback from our usability testing.
First, we added a map visualization to the group details page.
Second, we changed the workflow of joining a group starting from the task list. In the below paper prototype, you select the “Study Together” button from the button navigation bar and it takes you to the main page to select a group.
Reflection
Testing ideas in the early stage, move project in an iterative manner
What worked well for this project is that we keep having input from our users during the design stage, even early in the design phase. Thus, we moved our project in an iterative manner. As a UX researcher, I always value users’ views and experience, getting users involved in different stage of the project sometimes can bring new perspectives and insights to the direction of the project. For example, when we testing study group’s idea, one user mentioned about how he was not familiar with the direction of the school, which leads to ideas of adding maps to our design.
Not only listen to what participants say, but also notice what they do and react
Users’ input is important. However, this does not mean that we are going to take in everything, as it is not impossible to do so. Users are not designers, most of the time XD. They might say that they want certain features directly. but sometimes we need to uncover their needs and desires from the features instead of embedding the feature directly.
setting the scope of research/design problem is important.