WeStudy

​Most students would agree that online learning has been a difficult transition. College students especially have a different load of stress that they've never experienced before: Zoom burnout, endless assignments and lectures, and the feeling of isolation from friends and family. Students have a lack of motivation to do schoolwork, and dread turning on their laptops because they know a myriad of things are waiting for them on their student portal. Burnout is a still problem as the pandemic continues and the lack of healthy habits can mass-inflict detrimental repercussions to thousands, as we could end up seeing an even worse wave of mental health crises.​
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This is where WeStudy comes in; a social web application that aims to alleviate this new type of stress that comes with online learning. Through collective accountability from friends on the app, users are influenced by others to finish the tasks they set out for themselves, all while having the coveted social interaction that many are seeking. Above all, we aim to help students increase their motivation and hope it’s a tool that students will utilize to accomplish their goals.

This app was created as a project for COGS 120: Interaction Design taught by Scott Klemmer @ UC San Diego.

Mindfulness, the quality or state of being aware. When we aren't mindful, our minds are free from the pressuring tasks we have on hand and we return to Default Dark Mode, a state where we tend to be passive, daydream, or absentmindedly off doing other things. ​

Mindfulness is a powerful ability we have as humans to be aware of our thoughts in an overwhelming world. We wanted to find a solution utilizing mindfulness to find the best way to improve the mental lives of college students who are learning online.

We came into this online learning mindfulness brief with a couple assumptions that we needed to first verify through user interviews. We conducted interviews with our other college students, friends, and roommates and found some interesting insights.

We found that the lack of motivation is common with our target users. Many of our interviewees work for hours without taking breaks or eating, get distracted with the freedoms the internet offers, and don't feel inclined to pay attention due to the fact they can simply turn off their cameras.

We created two personas that encapsulated our user interview findings, needs, and pain points.

Although we observed the detrimental effects of having too much freedom due to the internet and the ability to turn off one's camera, we decided to focus on the motivation aspect of this problem. ​We know that people can get distracted sometimes, however we wanted to solve the bigger problem of trying to foster motivation. Implementing something like a website blocker didn't seem enough to solve this problem of motivation; it merely solved the problem of distractions. Even if students didn't have internet freedoms, they can find another way to be distracted.​

We then had the idea of implementing collective accountability. Through this idea, users and their friends help each other succeed by keeping each other in check, plan study sessions, and earn rewards together. Users will feel pressured to get things done (in a good way!)

I created a simple user flow chart to map out the interactions of these four main features. We used these as a guide when creating our prototypes.

We then made two different prototypes. One highlighting the overall features of the app (A), and one that focused primarily the accountability and work sessions functions (B). We conducted Heuristic Evaluation sessions with the two paper prototypes to to get feedback on our overall application idea, and to see which one fared better.

In the end, we chose to go with a fusion of both prototypes. Prototype 1 had a cleaner interface, however Prototype 2 had better data representation and felt more like an app. The visual data of the progress bars displaying a friend’s task progress is a great motivator to anyone who hasn’t completed anything that day. It sort of feels like a race that you want to catch up in. We would just have to keep in mind to reduce the overload of irrelevant data, and improve labeling screens and functionality.

WeStudy was my first UX/UI project where I went out and conducted user research, iterated on ideas, and fully developed a web app. I learned a lot of HCI skills in just a couple months, as well as the high programming learning curve I personally had to overcome. Although there were some bumps and unexpected changes along the way, my team and I are still proud of the final product. It was a great milestone for all of us as UX designers. ​
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If we had more time in the quarter, we would have conducted more user testing with our final prototype. We drafted our testing plans and procedures, but unfortunately, we didn't have enough weeks in the quarter to actually test on real students. Additionally, if I had more web development experience, I would have definitely wanted to implement more features that added to our solution: a chat function, our original calendar feature, and more functionality to the awards page, like counting the amount of breaks someone has taken and a popup animation of the award unlocking would play. I learned many things from this project, but here were my key takeaways:

Have a well rounded team, who share the same passions.
I'm grateful to have such great teammates because we complemented each other's strengths and weaknesses, and communicated effectively. It's important to have a group you are compatible with because it makes the work that much easier, you get to enjoy the design process more!

Make the best with what you have.
If this project taught me one thing, it was problem solving. Things don't always go as planned, and you just have to make the best with what you have. It would have been nice to implement more advanced JavaScript features into the app, but given our limited development skills, we instead focused on improving the things we knew how to do.

Code documentation is your best friend.
Self-explanatory. I would not have been able to code any of this project if it weren't for Codecademy or W3Schools 😭. There are plenty of resources out there, and no one should be discouraged from trying to learn a new skill!