iFocus
Purpose: M.S. Human-Centered Design & Engineering Project
Collaborators: Kim Dzubinski, Adrian Che, Julie Mills
Project Role: Concept development, user research, UX design, project management
Project Overview
While technology has the potential to empower people on an unprecedented scale, it can also act as a distraction. Students constantly self-interrupt their studies to engage in digital distractions, interfering with their ability to retain the material they are tasked with learning. With this project, we wanted to change the narrative - by helping students improve their study habits.
Concept
iFocus is an experience designed to help students focus better during study sessions. iFocus positively rewards students for time spent away from digital distractions with gentle encouragement and a sense of delight and satisfaction.
Design Question
We began this project by formulating an initial design question: How can we help higher education students reduce incidents of self-interruption while studying?
After preliminary interviews with users in our target group and secondary research, we learned that a habit of self-interruption through social media or other distracting apps can result in elevated stress levels, underachievement, and diminished capacity to understand and retain new information. This behavior can have short-term and long-term consequences for students.
Our goal was to design an experience for students that resulted in fewer incidents of self-interruption through digital distractions, leading to better focus while studying.
We defined digital distractions to include popular social platforms (like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram), individual and group texting, games, and news sources. We characterized studying to include any school-related tasks and activities, including preparing for exams, writing papers, conducting research, and completing homework assignments.
Our target users were male and female higher education students, ages 18 to 25, in the United States - though we hypothesize that our designs and research may have broader appeal and utility for other demographics as well.
Research Questions
We developed a set of five key questions to inform our user research:
What factors make the transition from digital distractions “on” to digital distractions “off” while studying as smooth, comfortable, and enjoyable as possible?
What consequences do students think might result in engaging in digital distractions while studying?
What do students think will happen if they disconnect from digital distractions?
How do students feel while they are disconnected from digital distractions?
In which scenarios are students comfortable with being disconnected from digital distractions?
User Research Methods
We pursued a mixed-method approach and selected four methods for gathering user research.
Survey: We created a short survey to identify explicit opportunities and needs through direct questions. The survey was an asynchronous method designed to reach a larger group and quickly collect impressions of our users’ needs, habits, and attitudes. We gathered both quantitative and qualitative results. The 11-question survey consisted of closed-ended, open-ended, and rating scale questions. Participants were recruited through an undergraduate student at University of Washington who distributed the survey to her peers, and we received 19 responses.
Interviews: To get a richer qualitative understanding of the survey results, we conducted a series of in-person interviews. They were structured, but were intended to elicit more free-form responses than the survey. The interview guide primarily focused on mobile habits while studying, awareness of the consequences of self-interruption, and solutions that might help students disconnect while studying. We conducted 6 interviews with students from University of Washington.
Rapid Auto-Ethnography: For us to understand study habits, we needed a research method that would allow us to get inside the minds of the students. Since learning and emotions are cognitive processes that are often invisible to observers, we asked the students to self-report and reflect on their habits, actions, and emotions in real-time. We created worksheets to track goals, efficiency, instances of social media notifications, and reflections on their study sessions. We distributed the worksheets to 8 students from University of Washington and California College of the Arts.
Activity Analysis: We wanted to ensure that we were not making assumptions about the studying process, so we directly observed users as they studied. We cataloged all tasks, actions, objects, participants, interactions, and environmental characteristics involved in the studying process. Through activity analysis of 3 study sessions, our team was able to see what users actually do in their real-world contexts, as opposed to what they say they do.
Key Research Learnings
We synthesized our research into 6 top insights to inform our next steps:
Mobile Habits: Students almost always have phones with them while studying. While phones can be used for productive reasons while studying (tuning out with music, photographing notes for later reference, checking school assignments, etc.), we noticed that productive use of phones often spirals into unproductive digital distractions - which can sabotage plans to accomplish study session goals.
Disruptions: When students receive alerts from social media while studying, more than 75% look immediately. Students check their notifications immediately for a variety of reasons: concerns of urgency, seeking a reward or study break, not wanting to miss something social, or boredom. Students typically check social media in 5 to 20-minute intervals, making it a difficult habit to overcome and leading to inefficiency while studying.
Study Schedules: The first 30 minutes of studying have the most instances of self-interruption and are an important period that impacts the rest of the study session. Once students fall behind schedule, they often feel unable to get back on track. This sentiment leads to feelings of frustration, stress, guilt, and anxiety - and can sometimes cause students to give up entirely on a study session.
Negative Consequences: Students are aware of potential negative consequences of self-interruption while studying. Perceived impact of self-interruption through social media includes worse retention (“difficult to learn material”) and decreased efficiency (“longer to absorb material”). Most students believe that “the phone is interfering with focus” and can experience feelings of guilt associated with their social media habits during studying. One student noted that she is “always aware it isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing.”
Study Breaks: Study breaks are important, but most students characterized social media and other distracting apps as an unhelpful disruption. Social media was perceived to be different from helpful disruptions (eating a small snack, drinking water, stretching, etc.) We discovered that the helpful disruptions were activities with a clearly defined start and end point, whereas digital distractions have no end point - making it difficult for students to decide when the break is over.
Personal Growth: Overall, students were excited by the idea of a solution to help them disconnect from digital distractions to maintain focus when studying. Most of our participants were eager to change their habits and wanted to see personal improvement and growth. They wanted to “change the feeling that I’m compelled to look at my phone all the time” and “build a muscle for turning off social media.”
Personas
After synthesizing and processing our user research, we created three personas to keep our users at the center of our thinking during our design process.
Design Requirements
We transformed the insights from our user research into a set of design requirements that informed our brainstorming and ideation process. These requirements provided a razor for evaluating our ideas and narrowing in on a solution.
The solution should:
Permit urgent communications
Measure personal progress and improvement
Improve study results (efficiency, material retention, etc.)
Involve setting study session goals
Promote confidence
Incentivize or inspire behavior and habit changes
Reduce feelings of guilt or stress
Work within the context of a student-defined study session
Adapt to different digital devices (phone, tablet, smartwatch, etc.)
Give a sense of security that students won’t miss out
Be customizable by students to account for different priorities
The solution should not:
Feel like nagging or micromanagement
Ideation
We ran a group brainstorm and gathered 25 potential solutions.
We used affinity grouping to cluster similar ideas into categories and themes as we refined our approach, and we referred back to our design requirements to guide us in the filtering process.
We specified four important elements of our design solution:
Mobile Experience: After exploring ideas that included hardware and physical spaces, we decided to scope our solution to focus on the mobile platform. While it might seem counter-intuitive to design a mobile experience when we are asking students to limit their digital distractions, our solution acknowledged their strong attachment to their devices - which are already integrated with their study habits and easily accessible while studying.
Self-Awareness: When considering the essential features to include in our design solution, we determined that it was important to encourage long-term behavior change by surfacing opportunities for self-awareness and reflection.
Goal-Setting: Our research clearly indicated a need for help in setting achievable goals and priorities for study sessions. We explored different levels of granularity and organization for this functionality. We made a design decision that this feature needed to be quick and easy for students to set up and initiate, as we did not want to introduce extra burden or take up precious studying time that they need for studying. We also decided to focus on goal-setting for only a single study session.
Built-In Breaks: We chose to build in specific break times with well-defined start and end points to allow students the opportunity to connect with others - an important behavior that they value - but prevent them from spiraling into a cycle of social media distraction by creating a distinct end to the break.
Design Principles
Based on our research, we developed 5 design principles to guide us through the prototyping phase:
Easy: We respect students’ time and deliver an uncomplicated experience that is fast and straightforward, with a quick path to usage.
Non-judgmental: Students use our application to build better habits - and whether they succeed or fail in a given study session, we encourage their drive for self-improvement and ensure that their experience is guilt-free and supportive.
Delightful: Our application presents a culturally relevant experience with an upbeat tone. Positive interactions inspire feelings of delight and spark joy.
Empowering: Our experience empowers students to succeed by helping them build better habits and achieve their short-term and long-term goals.
Prototyping
In order to evaluate our design, we created a paper prototype of the app informed by our research, design requirements, and design principles. We used the paper prototype to conduct informal, low-fi usability testing with five users based on a series of tasks.
In our first round of usability testing, we identified some areas of improvement:
Flow: Different order of input screens for goal-setting should be better aligned with students’ mental framework for study sessions (set goals before setting session length).
Flexibility: Ability to decide if a task is time-bound or not; customization of breaks: flexibility to change their timing and duration.
Data: Capture and view performance across study sessions over time.
Wireframes
Based on the feedback we received from our users, we made some adjustments to our design and created wireframes to establish the basic structure of the user experience.
UI Design
After creating the wireframes, we worked on a first iteration of UI design for the experience.
Experience Breakdown
Students initiate a study session by setting their goals.
We encourage students to improve their task management ability (and set reasonable expectations) by estimating their study progress in advance.
Based on the number of tasks and the progress students want to achieve, they can set appropriate study times and break times for the session. During the session, the app notifies users when it’s time for a break and gently reminds them to come back when the break time is over.
After the study session, students are asked to evaluate their progress and reflect on their performance. We believe that matching estimated and actual progress can improve task management skills.
Students are able to track their study performance over time with a data dashboard.
Students can also win progress badges as they hit certain benchmarks.