Lift
This mobile app aims to help international students be less stressed towards new environment and be more organized with coursework. It creates a new way to record and organize daily activities.
- Project Brief
- 2017.1 ~ 2017.2
- Individual Project
- My Role
- UX Researcher
- UX/UI Designer
- Interaction Designer
- Method & Skills
- Interview
- Persona & Storyboard
- Comparative analysis
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
- Tools & Softwares
- Sketch
- Illustrator
- Framer.js
- Invision
Problems
Problem
Arriving in a new country, international students are more easily stressed out due to language problems, heavy workload, etc.
Potential Solutions
Stress arises as a result of certain factors and then affects student's behavior and mood. So accordingly there are two potential ways to cope with it.
Final Solution Overview
An activity management tool
User Research
First-Round Interview
--To decide which solution is more feasible
To see which solution is more feasible, I did the first round of interviews. This interview focused on what causes stress and what these students found relaxing. It turns out that students have unique ways to deal with pressure problem. I did brainstorming afterwards and provided interviewers with 8 different ideas to choose from. Their choices are distributed, which also indicates it's hard to find an universal stress-relieving method that applies to everybody.
First-Round Findings
Second-Round Interview
--To redefine the problem
This round of interviews focused on why international students feel stressed by learning about their everyday life. One prevalent answer is they usually feel unorganized. So I kept on exploring what applications they are using now to organize daily activities and what's the problem within the process. In addition, I paid attention to international students' posts on social media to better understand what the feature of this unique group is.
"I'm busy everyday, but I don't feel productive. I don't know where my time goes."
Second-Round Findings
Why do they feel unorganized?
----Let's see one typical student's daily life
- Students gradually lose control of their schedules after adding new events in the daytime.
- Lack summary of work being done each day.
- Two main things in their daily activities are study and exercise, but it's hard to balance.
- Switching among various apps can be tiring.
My Proposal
How to display the information?
1. Timeline Display
2. Location Display
The reason why I finally chose to use Location Display
Final design decision----to create a map based information card
Low-fidelity Prototype
High-fidelity Prototype
Include everything in one card
When students open the app, they can easily check what's going on today. The size of the circle indicates how long they have been there, and the different route colors represent whether the user was walking or running at that time. Summary information is shown in the bottom of the card.
By spreading a specific spot, more details will show up, like the exact time a user spent walking, video taken on a certain route, study efficiency in a certain space, etc.
Archive and share
Lift is not only a management tool but also a life recording method. Users can choose to share their daily cards with their friends or parents to demonstrate their new life abroad, especially if they take enough pictures or videos on that day.
Detailed data
GPS will be used to track a user's location. When it comes to productivity, Lift will use the screen tracker and the laptop tracker to calculate the user's efficiency. Users can define the website/software setting by themselves too, like set "Photoshop" as "useful" software, "Youtube" as "useless" website. They can also set the line for efficiency. For example, they can set the line as "if above 50% time is spent on useful websites and softwares, then Lift should consider the user as efficient today".
Set goals for each day
Based on GPS and various tracker systems, Lift can automatically tell if goals set by users are accomplished or not. It relieves users' trouble to check the goal list by themselves at the end of the day.
