Design — Design a digital solution to help students prepare for life after school!
Design a digital solution to help students prepare for life after school!
1. Choose one of your top ranked student needs from the survey below. For this need, design your ideal digital experience that will effectively support students in this area.
a. Share your idea in detail, how it will work and why you think it will help students address the need. You may include visuals or mocks to help explain your idea.
Note: Your idea must have an online or digital component.
So I will Design an ideal digital experience that will effectively support students Better Time Management and help prepare them for life after school.
Effective time management allows students to complete more in less time, because their attention is focused and they’re not wasting time on distractions (such as social media, for example. Efficient use of time also reduces stress, as students tick off items from their to-do list.
I have chosen to prioritize this need because of the impact it has on the overall productivity of typical career persons in general, and the student in particular.
I will run us through what the design process will look like and the steps taken to achieve results.
First thing I did was to figure out exactly what we want to create: Time management tool and trying out Getting Things Done type of task management.
Next is Need finding
I started the process with need finding, which I did by interviewing and observing 4 people using their own time management tools. Because I knew I was going to design something digital, I thought it would be interesting to observe people who are not using digital time management for whatever reason. Knowing why they don’t use them could present valuable design opportunities.
Through these interviews, I learned that some people are unhappy with weekly calendar views on mobile devices and love paper calendars precisely because it gives them such a clear overview of their weekly schedule. They also felt that digital calendars fall short of paper calendars when it comes to juggling multiple projects. People preferring paper task lists did so because they felt they were more easy to use and let them know exactly what it is they need to do.
Next is Ideation:
I took all the things I learned in the interviews and broke it down in user needs. I then distilled those needs into following point of view to guide my design process:
“Digital time management should be as easy and intuitive as using paper calendar and to-do lists. By combining the good sides of both paper and digital tools, we can create a more functional, desirable, intuitive and informative solution for time management.”
I also looked in to pre-existing solutions for these user needs and gathered design inspiration from various sources.
After that, it was time to really dive into the design process and start thinking of possible solutions. I developed some preliminary concepts that I storyboarded and then built into paper prototypes.
Next is Heuristic Evaluation
Then I took the prototypes and started heuristic evaluation on them. One heuristic evaluation was done by observing 2 users use the prototype in person and 2 more through Google Hangouts with classmates. These evaluations proved to be valuable because they helped me to pin point some problems in my design very early on. The main thing I learned was that Getting Things Done task list structure is not that intuitive and user need more guidance on how the system works. Based on these insights I built the first digital screens for the porotype.
At this point, I revisited design brief to make sure I was on the right track and looked at my heuristic evaluations. I made a list of changes needed for the porotype based on the HEs and made that into a project plan to keep track of my progress.
Next is User Testing
At this point, the prototype already had main screens and navigation in place so it was time to start getting ready for user testing. I chose basic tasks I wanted to test and got some users for testing. I mainly wanted to know if users understand what they are seeing without explaining it and if the system is intuitive enough for them to perform basics tasks.
User testing exposed three main issues:
1. The prototype did not work on some computers.
2. The task lists explanation font was too small
3. Checkbox provided to indicate completed and stars to indicate priority was not a familiar pattern for everybody.
I fixed most of the discovered problems to the next iteration of the prototype but I was not sure what to do about checkboxes and stars on the task lists so I thought it is something that should be tested. An alternate version was done with titles above the columns and tested that against the simple version at usertesting.com. The results were inconclusive because of the small sample size, but this additional user testing made me realize the problem can be circumvented by making error recovery easier by not making list items disappear after they have been marked complete. This allows the user to click around and learn the logic if it is unclear.
Final steps
After this, it was time to finalize the prototype and make it pretty for presentation. I thought of a name for the app and came up with ONTAIM.
This was a private research done in August, 2021 by Onuzurike Chukwuagozie and also a part of Mindsumo Challenge. It has been laying idle since then on my PC, but I believe you might find it resourceful. I refuse to remain silent! No one should!!
Does this work make me a researcher? Hell Yeah…hahaha
So, if you have any research work, hit me up: onuzurikechukwuagozie@gmail.com
Mindsumo Challenge: Design a digital solution to help students prepare for life after school!
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Onuzurike “Touching Lives” Chukwuagozie
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Onuzurike Chukwuagozie
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onuzurikechukwuagozie@gmail.com
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