UX CASE STUDY
Study Buddy/Digipet is a personal project of mine where I examine the relationship between college student's mental health and their productivity.
Overview
Context
This is a project I did for my Mobile User Experience Design class towards the end of my 4 years at Fordham University. This was the second time I was working with Figma, and the first time I dabbled in Blender.
I worked on this project during a really rough time in my education where I felt like I couldn't keep up with my peers. When my professor told us to choose a topic — I was instantly drawn to the intersection of productivity and mental health.
Project Goals
01
Learn and practice my design skills with Figma
02
Explore the intersection of productivity and mental health using UX methods
Challenges
01
Planning and learning new tools (such as Blender) on my own
02
Getting sick halfway through my project!
03
Balancing expectations with reality. My original goal for this project was to fully learn how to use Blender and create a virtual character with it. With the timeframe and extra responsibilities during the semester, I ended up having to create a 2D animation instead of a 3D one.
Still working on learning 3D though!
Result
A thorough qualitative examination of how mental health impacts productivity for college students. This was an amazing opportunity to take a solo dive into the UX process! I still look back at the research methodology/insights of this project to inform research for my upcoming projects.
Research & Discovery
My area of interest when taking on this project was the intersection of productivity and mental health. I found myself being severely impacted by the sudden changes to my school and work environment during COVID, thus it inspired me to investigate this problem area.
I wanted to learn how to enhance productivity by introducing a social aspect, or by gamifying it.
Market research
Synthesizing & Redefining
After gathering insight from my domain research and really narrowing down key insights from interviews, I came up with a couple How Might We's to address the issue at hand.
Here's a breakdown of the insights and problem statement, as reflected in my midterm presentation for this project.
Key findings from discovery interviews
01
The hardest part of getting work done is having the motivation to get started.
“starting is the hardest part”
02
People often motivate themselves using negative consequences, causing more stress.
"I don't want to be a disappointment. I need to go to college and get a job"
03
Momentum is difficult to maintain.
“I always tell myself to start strong but I end up getting exhausted”
04
Students' workload often lingers in their day to day life as a stressor.
“At one point I couldn’t do anything without thinking about the amount of work I hadn’t finished”
Coming up with "How might we" statements
01
How might we motivate college students to complete tasks and positively reinforce productivity?
03
How might we encourage students to maintain their working momentum, building discipline?
02
How might we enforce healthy working habits, increasing productivity while maintaining good mental health?
Final Design Challenge
How might we incentivize someone who always procrastinates?
Ideation & Development
Now that I felt like I had a clearer idea of the scope of the problem, I began to ideate. After receiving feedback about traditional productivity apps potentially being an additional stressor, I began thinking of fun ways to get work done. I wanted the user to feel encouraged, rather than forced to do work.
This process gave birth to the Study Buddy idea!
Original Study Buddy feature brainstorming
User Flow
Style Guide
Character Design: Tamogachi Inspired
blinking animation
sleeping animation
Sample screen + prototype
Sample screen + prototype
Reflection
Keep iterating!
Being one of my very first Figma projects, Study Buddy is far from perfect. I was able to learn so much about working in Figma, but also about my own limitations. Because this project was so close to my heart, I had a perfect vision of what I was hoping to accomplish. I wanted to create a character in Blender that would be the highlight of my work. Getting COVID during this project threw me completely off my timeline, but made me learn which parts of the work to prioritize for a presentation the hard way.
I still remember being unable to speak while giving my presentation, coughing the entire time and unable to do the project justice. I wasn't able to get a character I liked in Blender, and had to quickly wrap up the prototype. It was painful to put so much effort into something and not be able to finish strong.
A month after this presentation, my friend from the class forwarded me an advertisement for a desktop pet that claims to help with procrastination. I was so incredibly surprised to see something I came up with actually built out by someone else. It made me want to keep working harder at it and create something even better.
I hope to keep working on creating Study Buddy and actually build it out as a sort of desktop pet. Even if it's just for myself and close friends — I will make it happen!