Motivating students’ to start and finish their assignments on time with the help of a classmate and a buddy bot.
Timeline: October 2022 to December 2022
Role: UX/UI Designer, UX Researcher, Product Manager
Tools: Figma, Miro, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro
Key learnings: UX research, user testing, wireframing and prototyping, video editing
This project was exhibited in the Victoria University Student Exhibition in 2022.
Problem
Students spend too much time procrastinating instead of starting and completing their assignments on time. This results in them feeling stressed and handing in work that’s not very good.
Goal
To help students get motivated to start their assignments early and to learn and understand their assignments and submit work they can be proud of.
Target audience
Students, particularly those who tend to procrastinate.
DISCOVER
Students choose to procrastinate instead of starting their assignments early. This is significantly linked to negative emotions such as anxiety and stress, not necessarily because of the quantity of assignments, but because of their ability to self-regulate, stay on track and complete their work. By delaying this task, they end up more stressed and anxious leading up to the deadline.
When I was researching potential solutions, I discovered that:
• Emotions develop over time so intervening at different points in the emotion-generative process should lead to different outcomes.
✨ Using this information, designers need to think about what they want to achieve and what touch point would be the most effective time for intervening.
• Self-compassion could change one’s motivation from avoidance to approach and it may reduce procrastination due to a lack of motivation. It enhances intrinsic motivation and successful self-regulation, therefore, reducing the tendency to procrastinate.
✨ Designers need to consider ways in which individuals can increase their self-compassion.
• Support from others can provide emotional comfort and warmth which would directly reduce an individual’s negative emotional experience. It can change individuals’ evaluation of the problem situation and reduce the stress associated with problem-solving. This in turn will give the individual self-acceptance and express more kindness towards themselves.
✨ Designers could look at how to remind individuals that they have a support network while they’re working on the task.
✨ Designers could look at social touch as a way to establish the feeling of warmth.
DEFINE
Based on my research, I decided to design an app called Buddy Up.
The aim of Buddy Up is to create an environment of perceived social support and improve self-compassion through support given by your buddy. This should hopefully increase productivity and make assignments feel more manageable. This is the initial model I created for the app:
💭 You find a buddy doing the same papers as you
💭 You can chat about assignments and view each other's goals and progress
💭 You can ask for support if you’re struggling
💭 You prepare motivational messages that automatically sends if you need support
DESIGN
This is a video that I put together that outlines the design and testing process of the Buddy Up app.
TESTING MY ASSUMPTIONS
From here, I wanted to test my design using a within-subject design to look at if the Buddy Up app fosters a sense of community with users and encourages them to do their assignments on time and without procrastinating with the help and support of another student in the same class, when compared to doing assignments without the Buddy Up app.
I asked a participant to complete a pre-experiment questionnaire to understand their current thoughts and processes when it comes to completing their assignments.
Following the pre-questionnaire, testing happened in a four-day period.
DELIVER
From the experiment, I realised that the Buddy Up Bot is quite an important feature of the app. When I originally designed the app, the onus was really on the two buddies to talk about their assignment and support one another and write supportive messages so when one needed support, they could click a button and the other would get a notification to send them a pre-written encouraging message.
Having the Buddy Up Bot proved to be an effective method of starting conversations and improving motivation and self-compassion.
In my new design, I added an introduction to the bot and then in the conversation, I added talking points from the bot itself. I still think it would be useful to have a separate section for the buddies to share their work and the bot will also intervene in that section and let each other know when work has been uploaded and to encourage each other to give feedback.
Promo video of Buddy Up
REFLECTIONS
I thought my experiment went well and I’m happy with the results of the testing. I enjoyed the process and the results really helped test the effectiveness of my design and concept.
If I had more time, I would’ve really liked to have tested Buddy Up on more users and for a longer period of time to get a better sense of its effectiveness. At the moment, it looks like it’s effective on a short-term basis. Another thing I would’ve liked to have tested is seeing how each other responds to sharing a task list or weekly goals and seeing each other’s weekly stats and progress. I want to know if having these features on Buddy Up would be effective for both parties.