StudyCoach
Gamify good study behavior.
Problem: Procrastination is a problem among many college students, negatively affecting 85% to 95% of them. Procrastination is associated with lower grades, stress, sickness, financial loss, increased drinking behavior, and lack of happiness.
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Goal: Design a digital solution to help students to avoid procrastination while studying.
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Solution Overview: The proposed solution, “StudyCoach” allows users to earn virtual medals by maintaining productive behavior. StudyCoach can also recommend optimized study schedules to users based on their study habits and the tasks that are currently on their study schedule.
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Project Duration: 4 Months
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Team: This was a solo project.
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Tools: Invision, Protopie, UserNeeds.com, Qualtrics
Process
Competitive Analysis
A variety of products that people currently use to resist procrastination, were analyzed. It was found that products that try to motivate improvement or to make schoolwork more comfortable, are not sufficiently powerful enough to get many people away from common distractors. More powerful products that block distracting websites or provide consequences for laziness, have workarounds and may be equally ineffective. Therefore, the present solution would have to provide a strong motivation to the user, and make it difficult or undesirable for the user to cheat.
Freedom locks distracting applications. However,
the locks can be circumvented
Procraster tracks productive behaviors and gives advice, but might not provide sufficient motivation
Sketching
Based on the findings from the competitive analysis, a variety of ideas were brainstormed and sketched. While ideas ideally addressed the needs found in the competitive analysis, quantity of ideas was prioritized over quality.
The sketches
Storyboarding
To demonstrate how the sketched designs would help users to resist procrastination, storyboards were sketched. Illustrating the users' experience was useful to the designer for specifying more specific details of the proposed designs. For the purpose of brevity, only one storyboard is shown.
The storyboard for sketch 1 from the previous sketches
User Feedback
User surveys and interviews were conducted to elicit feedback on the ideas. Participants were shown the storyboards and asked several questions about what they thought about using the proposed products in their own studying. Participants seemed to like apps that monitored their progress and rewarded them for not procrastinating, however, the reward would need to be sufficiently motivating.
A part of the document used to record user feedback
Convergence/Refinement
The findings from the surveys were incorporated into a refined concept. Based on the findings from the surveys, it was decided that the solution should monitor the user’s productivity and reward the user for being productive. To evaluate the user’s productivity, the application should monitor the amount of time the user spent on productive and unproductive websites.
Additionally, it would be ideal if the user could choose which websites they considered to be productive. Although it was important to prevent the user from cheating the system, it was also be decided that it was important to give the user freedom to decide what they considered productive and unproductive. This is better than currently existing solutions because the user would have to be honest before, instead of during the study session, which is much easier.
Paper Prototype
To test the concept, a paper prototype was user-tested with 5 participants from the target population. Participants interacted with the paper prototype as if it were a real system, and the experimenter manipulated the prototype to simulate the feedback from the system.
The concept received generally positive feedback. However, the tests revealed that the design had room for improvement.
A screen from the paper prototype
Interactive Prototype
The design was refined based on participants' feedback. A high-fidelity interactive prototype was then created as a proof-of-concept. As the prototype was not built to be user-tested, it is not truly dynamic. It does not take or process real data. However, most of the features can be navigated to simulate the intended user experience. You can view the prototype in action below or click here to interact with the prototype.
Design Concept
This section contains mockups of StudyCoach's screens and descriptions of their functions.
Home
The home page briefly describes the commonly used tasks and provides links to the relevant pages.
Manage Schedule
Users can manually add study sessions to their StudyCoach calendar, or sync their Google Calendar with their StudyCoach calendar. Users can also request StudyCoach to rearrange items on their calendar to create a more feasible schedule.
Medal Box
The medal box shows the user the digital medals that they've earned and the medals they have not earned. Users can earn medals by gaining experience points for being productive during study sessions.
Trends
The trends page shows users a graph that displays the average numbers of hours a day they spend on 1) study sessions, 2) using unproductive websites, and 3) using productive websites.
FAQ
The FAQ contains detailed documentation about how to perform various key tasks in StudyCoach, as well as of the purpose of the application.
Browser Plugin
After the user downloads the StudyCoach browser plugin, the plugin sits in the upper right of the user’s browser bar and allows StudyCoach to monitor their internet activity.
Study Session
The user receives browser notifications throughout their study session.
Next Steps
If I felt inclined to develop and release StudyCoach, a significant amount of design work would be necessary.
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A high-fidelity version of StudyCoach should be tested. For this to happen, a prototype of StudyCoach that can dynamically process user input must be created. For simple interactions such as filling out forms, and creating events on the calendar, a prototype created through Axure may be practical, as Axure allows for the simulation of a wide range of interactions. However, instead of actually graphing users’ productive and unproductive hours, the prototype would still have to provide filler data, which will be sufficient for the purposes of a user test.
It may be necessary to repeat the process of refining and testing the prototype, depending on participants’ feedback, and the timeframe of the project. Once the prototype has been satisfactorily refined, StudyCoach would then be ready for development and release.