Imagine

Stay on top of your group projects

This is a prototype that 2 students and I came up with for our ISM 210 class, Intro Human Computer Interaction. The app was built based on a design challenge:

“You’ve been hired by an educational software company to design an application that supports group project work in college classes, helps students to manage projects and work together, and tracks group participation so that faculty are able to ensure everyone is doing their work. Consider ways in which a novel system can use scheduling, tasks, and reminders to help users enhance, track or inspire their work.”

Interviews:

The first part of the project was going out around campus to interview college students. We wanted to hear about their experience with group projects and know about their approach on group projects. To do so, we came up with the following Interview questions:

How do you feel about group projects?
How do you communicate with the group?
- Does everyone reply when you try to get in contact?
Do you meet in person or online to do the project?
- If you meet in person, how often do you meet?
How is the work split up?
- How is leadership decided?
How do you keep track of who does their part?
- Have everyone done their fair share of the work?
  - If not, was it reported and why?
  - If not reported, why?
Would you do anything different with how you are handling projects now?
How was your last group project?
- Was it an organized or disorganized group?
- What went right or wrong?
What group project stuck to you the most? Good or bad
How do you get to school?
- Does it affect your group projects in any way?
Do you work?
- How many days a week do you work?
- How do you make time to do the projects?
How do you brainstorm? Explain your process.
- Do you brainstorm individually or in a group?
What would you change to make it a better experience?

After the interviews, I noticed that there was similarities in the responses. The interviewees tends to communicate with their group through text, email, or FaceBook. Another similarity was that members tends to take longer to reply to messages or don't reply at all. What made it hard for some interviewees to meet up in person with their group beside during class was that, some commute to school and others have work where it was hard to schedule around and meet with other members.

After combining our responses from our interviews, we came up insights and design principles to help us design an app that focuses on group projects.

Insights:

Progress Tracking

Groups tend to use interfaces where everyone’s work can be seen all at once.
Most groups keep track of everyone’s progress through digital applications.

Motivation

People in groups stay motivated if everyone else is too.
People want to get the work done as soon as possible so they have more time to do other things.

Problems

In many groups, one person is slacking in participation.
Because of how the project is graded, groups tend to report any issues 50% of the time.

Work Distribution

Work tends to be distributed by what everyone prefers to do.
Leadership is assigned by whoever takes initiative.

Communication

Every form of communication used is digital most of the time.
Google platforms are very popular within group projects.

Changes

Communication is an area in which group members wish to improve.
Many groups have conflicting schedules.

Features:

Design Principles:

A successful solution will be providing a digital workspace for users to keep track of their work, along with the work of others in their group.
A successful solution will send the user reminders throughout the length of the project to keep doing their work.
A successful solution will keep track what everyone does after the work is distributed.
A successful solution will determine what everyone will do through a questionnaire.
A successful solution will work across all google platforms
A successful solution will merge everyone’s calendars to develop a working schedule.

After the insights and design principles, we came up with 4 features to focus on: home page, calendar, chat, and profiles.

Home page:

On the home page, users are able to see how much work each member have done with a progress bar under their names. Users can click on a member’s name and be taken to the member’s profile page. From the home page, users are also able to go to their group message and calendar.

Profile:

Once the user clicked on a member’s profile page, they are able to see their major, year, work progress, and have the option to message them, see their calendar, and their work. On the page to see the member's work, the user have the options to comment on their work and/or to nudge them where they would get a notification.

Calendar:

On this page, the user is have the option to see their own personal calendar or the group’s calendar. They can also edit an existing event on the calendar or to add a new event. For the events that they create, the user have the option to share that event with their group.

Chat:

On this page, the user able to chat with their group members or an individual member of the group.

Scenarios:

Imagine you have to sign up for a group project using the app called Imagine. Once the app is open, sign up and “personalize” a profile to help pick your job in the group. Fill out the information and it will assign you your job.

Imagine you want to check up on your group members to see how much of their work has been done. You see that Sam still has not completed her part of the work and you want to let her know. Check the group progress page and comment on Sam’s work telling her to do her work.

Imagine you are a group member who no longer has time to do your part of the work because something came up. Check the group calendar, delete the current times you are supposed to be working on the project, and change when you can work on your project to let your group members know.

Paper Prototype:

After coming up with features that we wanted to focus on, we designed a paper prototype for our app. With the paper prototype, we were able to see what design principles worked best and build what we had in mind for the app. We were also able to test out our paper prototype and see what needs to change and how each page would connect with each other.

Balsamiq Prototype:

After making our paper prototype and testing it, we designed out low-fidelity prototype using Balsamiq. For this prototype, we mainly focused on the feature of letting users keep track of work and different schedules they have for the project. Our app is built for users to easily navigate through and know the functionality of each features as soon as they see them.

Try the prototype

When looking at the visibility of every feature within the app, there are drop down

screens that are visible and the user gets plenty of feedback (from the calendar feature

and from the app asking the user if they wanted to complete the action they want to

perform). In addition, the language included throughout the app is language that would

be easy to understand for mostly any user. There is as little as to no system-oriented terms

on any screen in the application. With user control and freedom, the user always has

the option to exit out of the current page and use another feature of the app with no

issues, everything is similar to what users have seen before. Also, the labels are for the

most part very straight-forward. When the user enters any data in the app, there are

feedback screens that pop up, letting the user know that their action has been

processed, and we also included confirmation pages. Everything that shows up on the

page is relevant and is the only thing needed on the page, and there are not many tasks

asked of the user; there are step by step questions in a short “questionnaire” included

when setting up an account, but it is not very lengthy. There is also nothing happening

in the background to distract the user from the task at hand.

Problems:

Overall, there were not many problems that we came across at the end of our Balsamic

prototype. One major issue was within the calendar feature, which did not allow a user

to change the date of an event. This violated user control and we decided to fix this by

adding a day option for the calendar. Another major issue was within the chat feature.

There was no clear difference between messaging the entire group or an individual

person, so we decided to change the “help and documentation” violation by Add a

separate tab to distinguish who you're sending an message to.

Conclusion:

Our group has created an application that would better support student group projects.

Within the app we solved most of the problems that people had when we asked people

all the question. The app helped the group members come together and gave them a

platform to do the work, see how much they have been doing, and then talk to each

other. It would help a lot of people and be very useful in any level of school.