Research

As a starting point, I thought a lot about why I personally found it so difficult to manage my time productively when it came to studying and getting work done. This led me to think of motivation. What motivates me to go about my day, and when am I most motivated? In addition, what makes me unmotivated, and when am I least motivated?

I am not the first student to struggle with motivation (or lack thereof), and productivity apps are certainly not a new concept. The problem was, I've tried using productivity apps before, but none of them has ever stuck. This either meant that existing productivity apps aren't made for users like me, or that I was beyond saving. Naturally, I leaned towards the first possibility and decided to make a productivity app to help the Alice Qiu's of the world to find motivation.

So, to make sure that my app is something that would work for me, I analyzed existing productivity apps and techniques to identify why these apps work for others as well as why they didn't work for me. Specifically, I looked at the Flora, focusing on what I considered to be the 5 most crucial criteria a productivity app should address: extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, aesthetics, customizability, and functionality.

Evaluating Flora against these 5 criteria, I found that the app didn't provide as much extrinsic motivation nor customizability, which made using the app feel less rewarding and less interesting for users who need that extra positive enforcement. As such, I knew I needed to up the extrinsic motivation and customizability for the app I make while ensuring it was also intrinsically motivating, aesthetic, and functional.

Process

With a better understanding of productivity apps and the criteria mine needed to address, I began working on my app. I started with basic productivity tools such as to-do lists and interval timers. The challenge was figuring out how to build upon these tools to create a specific productivity app that was appealing and effective for the target users. To do that, I needed to design features that targeted the users’ unique attributes and challenges.

One of the user attributes was "finds studying with others to be motivating", so I knew that the app needed a feature that allowed people and friends to use the app together to study together.

Going back to the Flora case study, extrinsic motivation and customizability were things I especially wanted the app to emphasize because the user was also 1) more extrinsically motivated and 2) got bored easily. Extrinsic motivation is all about deriving motivation from external forces such as rewards and punishments, so I started to think of feasible ways for the app to incentivize studying via rewards. After some brainstorming, I decided that the best way to incentivize studying through external motivation while giving users more opportunities to customize their experience was to gamify studying.

This led me to the concept of study space. In real life, everyone has a space where they study or work. In the study space app, each user has a study space (the ‘home’ of the game). Users ‘play’ by using the app to study, which is how they earn (fake) money to purchase various decorations such as posters, stationaries, chairs, etc. to customize their study space. Essentially, study space incentivizes users to study more for the purpose of earning more money and customizing their study space.

As this was my first time designing an app, there were certainly a lot of learning curves. From coming up with a working idea, to sketching the idea onto paper, to translating those sketches into a Figma walkthrough, I learned a lot about app design and wireframing.

This assignment underscored what I love most about design: problem-solving. It was definitely a challenge designing study space and making it an appealing productivity app to users like me who didn’t find productivity apps to be, well, appealing. But, that’s also what made it fun! I enjoyed researching what motivated users and how that affected their relationship with productivity apps, then translating those user needs into features that made study space a productivity app users like me would want to use.

Through working on study space from start to finish, I gained a newfound appreciation for 1) the research that goes into identifying and describing a question or an user's needs, and 2) the development a product undergoes before it becomes a solution to the user’s problems or needs. Though there is definitely space for improvement for study space, I am ultimately proud of the product. In the future, I would love to improve study space by doing more comprehensive research on who the target users are besides myself, as well as adjusting and upgrading the features and general appearance of the app.