TimeCookie
Remind U of T students of every academic task and help them start early.
Problem
Students sometimes forget their schoolwork or procrastinate until the deadline and suffer from increased amount of stress and anxiety.
Our Client
UofT's Innovation Hub
The innovation hub is a student-led initiative of the University of Toronto. It collaborates with partners across the university to research strategies for improving students’ experience.
Roles & Duration
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Conducted user research
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Established project goals
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Created low and medium-fidelity prototype
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Conducted usability testing
Oct 2021 - Dec 2021
Introducing Alice
Our Persona
Alice is a second-year CS student of the University of Toronto. She has tons of coursework to do. She usually forgets about her academic tasks and procrastinates until the last minute. Such behaviours have contributed to increased anxiety. She wants to get started on tasks early and be reminded of her tasks.
Needs
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Remember all her academic tasks.
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Start on tasks early.
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Take actions and execute her plans.
Goals
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Manage her time more efficiently.
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Finish all homework on time and avoid procrastination
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Reduce her anxiety
Challenges
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The existing time-management tools are hard to use.
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Lack motivation to start her school work.
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Easily distracted when she is studying.
Our response
TimeCookie is a time-management app that utilizes study groups formed by students in the same courses to help UofT students start early and finish their schoolwork on time.
Feature 1
Smart System
The system will generate study groups automatically, based on users' academic schedule.
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Synchronize schedule
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Recommend groups
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Auto-generate groups
Feature 2
Study Groups
Join different study groups and find study partners.
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View notification of group members' studying status
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View group's studying progress
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Update study status
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Feature 3
Focus Mode
Find and create study rooms and use the “focus mode” function. In the focus mode, students are asked to put their phones away for some period of time and focus on studying.
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Easy to find and create rooms
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Find study partners
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Using focus mode
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Collect badges as a reward
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Video Demonstration of Prototype
Design process
Step 1: Conduct secondary and primary research
Subjects
Interview subjects
19 participants from the University of Toronto. 18 out of 19 participants are students of the University of Toronto. One participant is the academic advisor of the school
Questionnaire subjects:
28 students from the University of Toronto. They are all graduate students.
Findings
Interviews:
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Lack of Time management and procrastination are sources of academic stress.
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Participants forget or are too lazy to create events.
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The existing products for time management (i.e.: Quercus Calendar, Google Calendar) are hard to use.
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Making a schedule can be stressful.
Questionnaire:
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On a scale of 1-5, academic stress and time management ranked as the top factors that caused anxiety and distress for students with a mean score of 3.39 and 3.14 respectively.
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On a scale of 1-5, the average upset level of U of T students was 3.25, which means that the students experienced moderate to high levels of stress.
Step 2: User Research Analysis
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Created persona "Alice" (shown above)
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Created an empathy map for Alice
3. Identified as-is scenario and pain points
Pain Point 1
Alice occasionally forgets to write down tasks, which makes it easy for her to forget things.
Pain point 2
Alice lacks motivation to start her school works.
Pain point 3
Alice is easily distracted while she is studying.
Step 3: Requirement Analysis
1. Identify the need statements
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Alice needs a way to distribute her time more wisely so that she would have more time to do other tasks.
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Alice needs a way to feel supported so that she does not feel she is doing something alone without any help.
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Alice needs a way to help her quickly get things to start so that she will not forget to do it later.
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Alice needs a way to note down her events quickly and easily so that she would not feel bothered when making plans.
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Alice needs a way to be reminded about her important events so that she would not miss any of them.
2. Generate Big ideas
3. Prioritization Grid
We decided to only focus on the home run, quick wins and big bets for our final product.
Step 4: Prototypes
1. Hills (Project goals)
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Alice can get started on her school tasks and events early to reduce her stress level during busy times.
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Alice can be reminded by her peers and never miss any important tasks to be more motivated to achieve high-quality academic results.
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Alice can find study groups for every task of the courses without any manual input to save time doing actual tasks
2. Low and Medium-fidelity prototype
Step 5: Evaluation & Next-steps
We conducted usability testing for four participants who are students of the University of Toronto using the think-aloud protocol and interview. They followed the key workflows of the prototype and gave us insight into how we can further improve the app.
Key findings
1. Usability testing for medium-fidelity prototype
2. Iterations
A positive attitude to communication is essential in group work. A dispute is sometimes inevitable, but by allowing all group members to freely express their views on this issue, we can see where the group thinks we should be going, and sometimes two awesome ideas can be combined together.
User Experience Design is iterative. In our design cycle, we frequently found that we needed to go back to do more research or adjust our need statements/prototypes. Listening to the feedback of experts also helps us produce more professional work.