This case study focuses on an all-in-one application designed to help students and self-developing individuals improve their focus and study sessions. Balancing school, work, and personal life can be challenging, and time management techniques can be key to success.
The app offers a comprehensive solution for mitigating disruptions and organizing study sessions, with features that enable users to customize and manage their time effectively.
Project Overview
aio focus companion
Supraliminal
This case study focuses on an all-in-one application designed to help students and self-developing individuals improve their focus and study sessions. Balancing school, work, and personal life can be challenging, and time management techniques can be key to success.
The app offers a comprehensive solution for mitigating disruptions and organizing study sessions, with features that enable users to customize and manage their time effectively.
Project Overview
aio focus companion
Supraliminal
My Role
Since this was a solo project I performed roles including:
UX Research
Design
Usability Testing
Design Toolkit
Figma
G.Forms
ChatGPT
Miro
Design Process
Research
Collect informations from already conducted researches
Create and run a focused survey about the people and the circumstances
Summarize and define the actual problem space
Analysis
Create Lucy as the center user persona
Characterize the target audience and their needs
Affinity map creation
Analyze the competitor applications and their solutions
Create and Test
Feature Ideation
Low fidelity wireframe creation
Early usability test
Designing the high fidelity prototype
Validation
Prepare the usability test points
Conduct the test with 5 person who are involved in the problem
Evaulate the feedback and implement any needed changes
Less is more
Solution
People pursuing education require a comprehensive tool to mitigate disruptions and organize study sessions.
A compact application with time and plan management features, customizable to different preferences, would be ideal. Additionally, the app could include elements that provide assistance without causing distractions.
In today's world, where access to profitable knowledge and interrupting content is just a click away, individuals must overcome numerous distractions to maintain their focus.
Unorganized study sessions affected by distracting factors can cause frustration and lead to drops in grades and class performance. Additionally, individuals with busy schedules may find it difficult to make progress without proper guidance in their self developing exercises.
The early insight
Problem Statement
Problem Discovery
Increasing number of failure in education
Problem-Based Idea
As I started this project I’ve found numerous online reports from 2022 stating grades and classes dropping around the world.
Students facing silently raising difficulties caused by different disrupting factors.
Further examinations and secondary research confirmed my thoughts that some of the most common factors that inhibits learning are the following:
Stress
Procrastination
Noisy Environment
Multitasking
“In Houston, 42 percent of students received at least one F in the first grading period of the year.”
- Houston Chronicle
“Sharp rise in university dropouts due to inflated Covid A-level grades.”
- Daily Mail
“Nearly 40 percent of grades for high school students in St. Paul, Minnesota were Fs — double the amount in a typical year.”
- Advantages DLS
UX Research Method: User Surveys
Mapping the people and the circumstances
Analysing the Context and the Behaviour
Right after the discovery phase, I wanted to get a better understanding how students and self-developing individuals are currently managing their study sessions.
The survey aimed to answer questions such as:
What kind of distruptive factors they face?
How do they solve these issues?
What types of devices do they use during study sessions?
How many of them practice time management techniques?
These were my focal point questions, which were the keys to properly discovering this everyday situation that is divided by distance and shared among people.
User Persona
Meet with Lucy
Comprehensive User Profile
Based on the gathered insights, I created a detailed user persona that represents the target audience's key characteristics, including their education, employment status, struggles and goals. Personal and professional backgrounds.
The creation of Lucy were based on the survey results, gathered experiences from my personal connections and also on my own experiences.
The created user persona was instrumental in guiding my design and feature decisions. By keeping Lucy in mind, I aimed to find compact and effective solutions to the problems at hand.
Affinity Map
Empathizing with Lucy
Converting Research Data into Practical Conclusions
To summarize the research data, I made an affinity map to simplify the responses, categories, and percentages into a more easily understandable format.
Carefully making assumptions and creating cards that address the 5W's to understand the current situation of potential users.
Who is the user?
Students and self-developing individuals with tight schedules. They have part or full-time jobs. Living active social life, they have short and long term goals aiming career start or transition.
They are under pressure due to contstant performance expectations, deadlines and anxiety caused by self-expectations.
What do they want to accomplish?
They organize personal, educational and professional life with some difficulties. They have self-improvement goals to achieve tied to personal progress.
They wants to master new skills and maintain their progress in different areas of their life. They also like to create balance between work and life.
Where will they be using the product?
The learning and self improvement tasks usually taking place at their home but its not out of the ordinary if they practicing at their workplace or in a public library.
Home or outside, they usually face both physical and digital disruptive factors.
When will they be using the product?
The sessions depend on the person's preferences but the average study hours per week is around 15hours.
They have a somewhat flexible range but usually they have to carefully implement new events into their schedule.
Unexpected events may cause them to deviate from their plans.
Why are they using the product?
Due to lists of tasks, projects and plans they wants to organise their day-to-day activites with little effort. The potential user wants to thoughtfully manage the atusy sessions for better results, track the upcoming plans to avoid delays and overall lower the feeling of lack of time.
The product would aid them daily with their study sessions but due to the nature of time management techniques, it can be a helpful tool outside the self-developing circle. Because of the breathing exercise feature the app may help the user decrease their level of stress and anxiety.
Competitive Analysis
Time is of the essence
User-Focused Comparison
At this point, I’ve got a better knowledge about the problem space and the actual situation of the involved people. Who they are, how they feel, what problems they’re facing with and what kind of pursues they have.
With this knowledge at hand, I proceeded to analyze two apps that offer similar solution like Supraliminal.
These were: Focus Keeper and Focus To-Do
I targeted my research on:
User-Friendly Interface
Timer Design
Extra Features
Subscription Benefits
I compared and contrasted the benefits and drawbacks of each app, exploring how they impact users' ability to concentrate during study sessions.
Supraliminal
adjective Psychology.
above the threshold of conscious perception
Feature and Design Ideation
What do we have here? What do we need here?
Creative Direction and Feature Priorization
At the beginning of the designing phase, I utilized the MoSCoW Analysis to determine which features were a must, should, could and would-be-nice-to-have. This approach helped me to prioritize and eliminate ideas that were potentially distracting or unnecessary.
Ultimately, my goal was to design an application that would help people manage their time and stay focused while they work. The overall design should be calming and friendly, while the features and setup should be simple and straightforward.
During the design ideation I used ChatGPT for color suggestions based on the original idea which connects the UI visual scheme to the feeling of a peaceful library.
I also used the AI language model for non-creative description creation, such as the Safety Warning which were lately verified by professional source.
MoSCoW Analysis
Supraliminal Sitemap
The liminal spac… structure
While designing the structure of Supraliminal, I aimed to create a user flow that is linear, fast, and easy to remember. Users can switch between the main features at almost any point, and the initial design structure was created to be both versatile and compact.
Wireframes
The first blueprint
UI Kit
Environment inspired interface
Usability Testing
Two-side exploration
The First Experience
Upon completing the initial version of the prototype, I was excited to inspect the users reactions to the design and their ability to complete the assigned tasks.
The testing was conducted separately with five individuals who shared similar backgrounds with our previously created persona.
All participants were pursuing some form of education, held full-time jobs, had experience with time management techniques, and were familiar with the challenge of fitting daily tasks into a 24-hour timeframe.
The usability testing focused on the following areas:
Ease of setting up the requested study session
Speed of locating the notification options
Identification of any points where the users experienced UI confusion
Measure how intuitive the overall userflow and first-hand experience
Results and Summary
Evaluate and Refine
The work continues
In general, the results of the usability testing for Supraliminal were positive. Users found the app to be potentially helpful in managing their study sessions, and they rated the design environment comfortable.
However, the testing revealed some areas for improvement, particularly in terms of notification accessibility and streamlining the user flow from the breathing exercises to the study session.
Based on the test results, I plan to refine the UI to better communicate what kind of notifications are disabled, as well as implement new ways for users to easily jump into their study sessions after completing the breathing exercises.
By addressing these issues, I believe that Supraliminal can become an even more effective tool for helping users achieve their goals and increase their productivity.
To get the most out of the Supraliminal case study, please visit the website version.
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