Overview
Project Brief
A new way to “bee” productive, Buzzy Bee is a platform for students to seek accountability from their peers in order to track and reach their goals. In the span of 6 weeks, our team followed a human-centric approach to create an application that encourages student to stay committed to their academic goals and study effectively with social support.
My Contributions
My main role in this project was leading high-fidelity sprints and defining a design system. My collaborative efforts included conducting user research/interviews, synthesizing data, ideating features, and usability testing.
Given Prompt
Finding new activities and hobbies can be challenging for individuals, and staying committed to pursuing their goals and hobbies can be even more of a struggle. Accountability is a great way to ensure growth and progress, but it’s difficult to find those who share the same hobby/goals. Design a solution to help users find others who share like-minded goals and activities to build long-lasting and meaningful connections.
Problem Statement
When faced with limited social support, many college students struggle with time management and staying dedicated to their goals.
How might we help students track their goals and connect with their peers in a way that effectively encourages academic achievement and accountability?
Awarded Best UX Research for Design Interactive’s Spring Cohort 2023, judged by a panel of experts from Spotify, Netflix, and Google.
User Research
Surveys
We conducted surveys to better understand college students' goals and their relationship with accountability. In the first round, we gathered 82 responses, followed by 27 in the second round.
Round 1 - Looking at Overall Habits
In this round, we asked broad questions to understand college students’ goal habits and how they create and maintain relationships.
35% sought out an accountability buddy to help them achieve academic goals
Round 2 - Narrowing Student Priorities
Academics or lifestyle and career? When we received our project prompt, our initial idea was to create an app that helps users stay accountable for their hobbies and personal goals. But we started to question if that was truly what our target demographic (undergraduate students aged 18 to 22) needed.
57.14% are close friends with their study partners.
The top two challenges college students face in achieving academic goals are time management and procrastination.
User Research
Interviews
We conducted 10 interviews and broke it down into three main sections:
Through our interviews, we discovered that students:
Tend to seek help from their peers only when it is necessary
Prefer to study alone due to conflicting class schedules
Thrive with a strong, supportive social network
Literature Review
Research from Signature Analytics suggests that publicly sharing goals leads to a 65% success rate, but having a specific accountability partner increases it to 95%. Additionally, having a trustworthy accountability partner improves performance and efficiency by providing candid feedback and maintaining focus on goals.
Competitor Analysis
We researched various existing academic apps to learn about features that allow users to accomplish their goals and study effectively with social support.
Synthesis
Pivoting Directions
Initially, our prompt emphasized the social aspect of student life. However, our research revealed that most respondents prioritized finding an accountability partner for academic pursuits.
After gathering our data we decided to synthesize key points and map out patterns and trends among our insights through affinity and empathy mapping.
Pain Points
Procrastination and time management impede academic goal achievement
People prefer to study alone due to different class schedules
Inadequate social support hinders productivity and academic achievement
Broken connection of communication between students and their peers
Conclusion
Our analysis revealed that many students struggle to find study partners nearby with similar academic goals and schedules, leading to decreased motivation and productivity. Therefore, a solution is needed to help students easily connect with nearby study partners who share their schedules and academic objectives.
Ideation
Brainstorming Features
We came up with potential features to address our how might we statement, categorizing them from high to low priority for incorporating into our final product.
Information Architecture
We created an information architecture to organize the contents of our app under four main sections:
Low-fidelity
Designing Features for Accountability Partners
Using insights from affinity mapping, empathy map, and feature ideation, I sketched possible solutions to address our user painpoints and problem statement. My main focus was designing the social features for Buzzy Bee, including the chat, user profiles, and shared productivity tools.
Mid Fidelity
Initial Wireframes
I refined my low-fidelity frames to mid-fidelity frames with the initial features I wanted to implement for social accountability.
Usability Testing
Validating our Information Architecture with Card Sorting
We selected 26 features for users to sort into four categories and asked them to label each section. Through 7 rounds of card sorting, we gained valuable insights into users’ preferences for feature placement.
Usability Testing
AB Testing and User Testing
Based on common patterns and suggestions from users we found in 7 rounds of AB Testing and 5 rounds of user testing, we iterated a new version of our prototype and asked users to compare between the two versions.
Let’s take a took at some of our major redesigns:
Navigation Bar
Card sorting revealed that users categorize features based on familiarity bias. As a result, we revised the navigation bar to four pages: Home, Social, Map, and Profile, replacing Chat with Map. A/B testing confirmed that users preferred this updated categorization.
Activity Status
This feature initially was intended for users to update their status accordingly to their current activity (working, studying, sleeping, etc.). However, many users expressed that they found this to be more of a hassle to update than a useful feature. In response, we simplified the activity status to automatically indicate online, offline, and in a study session statuses.
Removing Calendar from Home Page
Several users reported feeling overwhelmed with the calendar being located within the home page on top of an abundance of other features. We decided to remove this in order to declutter the home page and give priority to other prominent features such as goal creation and preview.
Distinguishing Folders & Classes
There was a recurring confusion around the difference between folders and classes during our usability testings. We redesigned these features in order to clearly distinguish them from one another.
Final Solution
Design System
I created a design system using the Urbanist font for its minimalistic qualities, which enhance legibility and organization, fitting our app’s academic focus. I primarily used purple and yellow, along with several accent colors, to achieve a vibrant and welcoming atmosphere. This approach was intended to counteract the intimidating feel often associated with academic apps, a trend we noticed during our competitive analysis.
Final Features
This section highlights the features I prototyped. For a complete overview of Buzzy Bee’s entire feature set, check out our Medium article.
Shared Timer
To address time management challenges and conflicting schedules, I designed a shared timer feature for remote collaboration.
Focus Mode
The focus mode of the shared timer feature helps users stay focused by minimizing distractions, allowing them to prioritize their task at hand. Users can also enable messaging with their accountability buddy if communication is needed during the session.
Shared Goals
Shared Goals allows users to create and accomplish goals together with their friends. The process for creating shared goals is a lot simpler than a regular goal (from home page), with optional sub-tasks and no prioritization tags.
Additionally, users can pin important goals, which will appear under the chat header as a reminder.
Productivity History & Insights
Measuring and visualizing progress can significantly boost motivation. Users can access a statistical summary of their activity with their accountability partner and review their productivity history.
Reflection
Working on Buzzy Bee was both enjoyable and challenging. With a background primarily in visual and graphic design, I gained valuable hands-on experience in UI/UX thanks to the guidance of my product manager and teammates, who brought strong UX research skills and comprehensive design process experience to the project.
I also learned more about the inner workings of auto-layout, components, and other features in Figma, advancing my technical knowledge and proficiency using new design tools.
Here are some of my key takeaways:
Focusing on users’ goals and needs and always relying on research insights to avoid personal bias
Emphasizing essential features over excessive options
Ensuring accessibility while designing in dark mode by adhering to WCAG color contrast and font size legibility guidelines
Collaborating Effectively Across Disciplines: Learning how to communicate and coordinate with team members from different specializations to achieve cohesive design solutions