Overview
The Scope
" What do UofT students need?"
This project was made for the INF1602 course.
This year, INF1602 collaborated with The Innovation Hub to provide students with a design challenge to help University of Toronto students.
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Platform: Mobile Application
Sector: Productivity, mental health, social
Roles
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Team
Cherie Yuen
YuChing Huang
Evan Rees
Cindy Thai
Tools
Figma
Mural
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe photoshop
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Duration
8 Weeks
The Problem
A majority of university students are experiencing burnout every semester affecting their academic career, social life, and mental health.
Research
Survey & Interview
For this study, our participants consisted of Post-secondary students and Alumni of the University of Toronto. We asked our participants about their symptoms, experience, and solutions when they experienced burnout.
Out of 54 Participants, 96.3% has experienced burnout in their university career
Common Symptoms
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Stress
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Anxiety
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Fatigue
Burnout affected
Their Solutions
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Productivity
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Mood
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Performance
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Motivation
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Sleep
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Spend time with family and friends
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Exercise
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Hobbies
Personas
We gathered all the data that we compiled from our survey and interview and created a persona named Jonathan to discover what pain points we needed to address.
Pain Points
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The normalization of experiencing burnout as a student
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Difficulties in time management throughout the midterm period
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The lack of social relationships during this time as well
Process
Ideation
We came up with 11 main ideas to combat burnout and narrowed them further down to incorporate them into our prototype
We envisioned the perfect journey for Jonathan to go through his semesters and used our top ideas to help his productivity, social interactions, and his coping mechanisms.
Sketches
We created sketches for our low fidelity and received feedback to improve before we continued on to prototype our product.
Changes
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We reduced the number of features
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We removed the puzzle incentive and replaced it with collecting fishes instead
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We focused our attention more on the consistency and simplicity of the product
Prototyping
Features
Time Bubble
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Add your due dates to the calendar
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Overview of all assignments that are due
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Pop the bubble when you finished them
Reach Out
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Find your favorite chatroom category
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Choose a person you like to connect with
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Talk to them whenever and wherever you want
My Little Buddy​
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Track your mood
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Get a list customized list of activities to make you feel better
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Collect your own fishes when you complete all activities
High Fidelity
Evaluations
Usability Testing
Methods:
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Observation
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Interview
Preparation:
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Zoom & Prototype Links
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Interview Questions
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Testing Conditions
Users:
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4 University of Toronto Students
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Post-secondary students
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Ages 21 - 24 years old
Tasks:
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Mark your written part of your assignment task complete in time bubble
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Input your mood and get your daily result in my little buddy
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Complete your daily activities and add the fish to your fishbowl
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Reach out to the nearest person who is interested in gaming and have a conversation
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Findings
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Unclear of feature functions
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Too many features
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Unclear icons
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Preference for only the time bubble
Next steps
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Include first-time tutorials and icon names
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Reduce features from 3 to 2
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Input study topics for time bubble feature.
Lessons Learned
I learned different techniques on how to test my products and I also learned how to let go of ideas. Even if I really like the idea, it is no use if the user cannot use the feature. Although we had limitations with remote delivery, we managed to conduct all of our interviews and receive feedback. I also realized that a project is never truly finished and there is always room to improve.
Media
