Procrastination & productivity are universal challenges faced by adults of any age. However, college students are prone to struggle with procrastination and poor work habits exponentially more during schooling. The pandemic and the back and forth nature of online vs in-person classes have only amplified this issue.
We learned about procrastination and time management challenges that current college students began to experience, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and now affect them during the transition back to in-person learning. We conducted interviews, audits of services on the University of Michigan campus, existing online tips, as well as secondary research about topics relating to procrastination with school during COVID-19, the transition back to in person and general struggles with time management.
The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis and requires large-scale behavioral changes and places significant psychological burdens on individuals. In recent years, the popularity of Conversational Agents (CA), such as chatbots (text-based CAs), has grown. Because of the unique characteristics they offer, such as automated dialogues, personalized interactions, and empathic qualities, chatbots have been increasingly used in many different domains. Studies show that task-oriented chatbots that assist users with performing specific tasks (e.g., banking, customer service) have been implemented and popularly used, and chatbots on social medias (e.g., twitter, facebook) are becoming more popular.
Our team conducted secondary research on common causes for procrastination and distractions, feelings of guilt related to procrastination, methods for coping with procrastination and productivity, and the affects of online learning/ the transition back to in-person learning. Here's what we found:
We conducted interviews for our primary research with 7 participants from a variety of ages, genders and majors.
We asked the interviewees questions about their current time management strategies and how well they maintain them, their biggest distractions and challenges with being productive, the effects of online learning vs. in-person instruction and the participants desires for their time. Our team grouped the responses into an affinty diagram (pictured below) and we found:
From the affinity diagram, we brainstormed 20 concepts for our chatbot and app service design to consider for usability testing:
Following the generation of 20 different design concepts, our team selected a few ideas on our list to potentially move forward with. We then created storyboard scenarios (pictured below) for each of those concepts and brought them to our interviewees as well as other classmates in our target population for needs validation review.
After consulting with our target population we received feedback on the following and identified the user needs as such:
Based on our team's needs validation, we came up with four main tasks to create paper wireframes (pictured below). With these paper wireframes, we conducted a think-aloud session with college students to test the usability of our interface. Though we primarily received good feedback on the ease of use and visual hierarchy, there were some instances of language and symbolism that needed further iteration for clarity.
Our team's final design is a productivity app service centered around a one-on-one chatbot experience to help college students navigate their busy work schedules. Below are the design specifications of the app:
