FocUs

MY ROLE

UI/UX Design

TIME

October 2015 - Apirl 2016

PROJECT

Mobile App Design

Background

Distraction is a common issue especially in learning. External stimuli and internal thoughts can both split students attention. According to some studies, concentration can largely influence the efficiency in learning, especially the transformation of short-term memory to long-term memory. With the fact that some college students are not able to avoid temptation from technolgy, this will directly cause distraction which leads to procrastination and finally have unsaitisfing academic performance.

Mission

This project is aim to design a mobile application to help students keep distractions away and concentrate on their study. Through the user-centered design principles and cognitive science theories, this project explores several methods to achieve this goal. The main features of this mobile application are breaking down the big task into small, meditation, group accountability and self-regulation. By combine those strategies together, learner will maximum their study efficiency and productivity.

Design process

Research

College students spend around 10 hours daily interact with their cellphone.

80% college students use their cellphone during class or assignments.

Intellectual achievement takes time and perseverance For college student, study consumes lots of time and exertion. Thus, if students can't remain their attentions on studying for quite a bit time, this process of hard work would be ineffitient and less productive.

Self control ability is a kind of personal and limited resource for people. It consume strength, and will decrease to the level of exhaustion without recovery, like the muscles. it's not easy to maintain a high level of concentration for a long time in academic work.

College students spend 60% of the day interacting with technology. The technologies such as the cellphone has increase the number of tasks and the time spent on task shifting during study and most of them are for leisure use, such as social networking, surfing the Internet, watching videos, and playing games.

Logic model

The primary goal is to keep users focusing on their work for at least 40 minutes. The application will guide users into a positive mood, through meditation and imagination, users will try to feel the pleasure which motivated them to finsh the "short-time task".The application also creates different challenge groups for people who have similar working plan or goals. People who participate the same group can encourage others group members. A dashboard which presents the time data analyzing about user's behavior will be shown to keep users on track.

User testing

After designed the first version of the low fidelity prototype, I conduct a user testing with four audiences. Two of them are DMDL students who have expertise in cognitive science and learning strategies and two non-DMDL students who like trying different mobile applications. The method I used in user testing is thinking aloud. Through the whole process of their interacting with this application, I found out a lot of potential problems. They also give me bunch of feedbacks which are really helped. These problems fall into three categories, misunderstand user interface, vaguely comprehend description and user friendly interaction. Based on these feedbacks, I redesigned part of my prototype into the final version.

Prototype

In this process from the research at the very beginning to the prototype at the end, I really realize the saying that idea is not as value as process. Brainstorming makes people feel wonderful, the whole bunch of ideas looks fantastic. But going through all the design process and complete the final goal really need to make a lot of effort and perseverance, which is similar like learning with remaining high level concentration I have researched about in this project. Although the topic haven't changed, but the initial idea was shaped again and again through each step in the design process.

Key consideration of UI

The dominant color of the interface is light sky blue, because blue shows stability and peace. It provides users a gentle mental state.
Besides the color, I add the element of water, in coorperation with the blue color and symbolize the time.