Universal Design
Briefadoo — Task Organisation Tool
In a time of remote learning, those who need extra help can fall through the cracks. Who needs help and how can I use my skills to help them?
Duration
March 2021 - May 2021
Contributors:
Michaela
Project Type
Academic
User Experience Design
Universal Design
Design for Accessibility
My Contribution
Research
Visual Design
User experience Design
Interaction Design
Test facilitator
01 Problem
Students are finding remote working challenging, especially those who need extra help or extra time. We know this by attending expert interviews. These students
Can lack motivation
Have difficulty concentrating
Lack of focus
With an unbalanced structure
I spoke with Anna* about her struggles in college. Anna's flare-ups from her arthritis keep her from finishing tasks. The chronic fatigue she experiences from this allows her assignments to build up to an unmanageable amount. She always hands in projects late, always asks for more time. This gave her more stress and anxiety and therefore unmotivated her to start.
02 Research
When looking at secondary research, I found that anxiety within students, in general, is a significant, widespread problem. But In a report on young people with physical and sensory disabilities from MyWorldSurvey, over half of the 52 participants were over the normal range of anxiety. 75% of this 52 were students.
Looking at COVID specifically, In an ahead survey of 601 students with disabilities, 64% of these reported that their biggest challenge was a lack of structure and motivation to learn
* Not her real name
The problem is online learning leaves students disengaged, unmotivated, and loss of focus. Some students with extra needs are particularly affected. Assignments are piling up. They don't know where to start.
We need a seamless way to help bring that structure back into their lives, which fits their daily needs.
How can I help?
I brainstormed a range of ideas to meet each challenge identified earlier and conducted dot voting to trim down the option. Let’s go back to Anna, who we met earlier, and build a persona around their characteristics and stories tying them in with our expert interviews and desk research and solve the problem specifically for them.
With the aid of an empathy map, I could Identify what Anna says, does, thinks, and feels daily. We could empathize with her and identify her needs. Anna needs a way to manage her Assignments and time efficiently and fast. So How might we help Anna to create a balanced routine and structure again? How might we help Anna break up her tasks into manageable chunks and not overwhelm her?
Using a mix of frameworks to aid in design and vision work
What if?
What if Anna had an app that could solve these problems? What if Anna had an app to automatically break up her assignment into chunks.
Using Google's heart template to map out what metrics the app needed to focus on to be a successful business model, I could break down this business model to identify its sole purpose, break down assignments into manageable chunks, and determine its value. This is to help students achieve their goals and reach their potential.
The result was Briefadoo.
Briefadoo
Briefadoo is a student app integrated into the institution’s ecosystem. Focusing on being accessible and inclusive, user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing, but most importantly, helpful. It is essentially a student support app hidden behind a friendly interface and lively illustrations.
What Briefadooo does is automatically break up your assignment into chunks. Breifadoo’s goal is to make approaching briefs easier for students to help them reach their full potential. Seeing their tasks visually in small pieces gives the students more achievable goals.
What did Anna think?
We tested this concept with Anna, who immediately loved it, making sense as we designed it specifically for her and students like her. We also tried it with other participants to get a fair assessment.
I tested it to uncover any problems within the design, discovering further opportunities to improves it, and colled feedback from participants feedback in terms of usefulness and preference. In moderated usability tests, we found some issues with the first iteration. The second iteration was a more straightforward and hopefully more intuitive version of the app.
The Final Briefadoo
Anna can…
Anna can get onboard with Briefadoo. She uploads her brief using the camera, which recognises the sections. We enter a home screen to all of your briefs and your tasks that day. It tells you how many briefs you have, how many tasks are outstanding, and how many have been completed.
Anna can go into the brief, which opens on her tasks. Here she can easily see every requirement she needs to address. If Anna wants, she can go further into the brief by looking at the overview, which hosts all of the briefs information she learning outcomes.
A resource list allows you to directly download tools, documents or reserve a book if available from the IADT library. Anna can upload a new brief easily from the floating button. This is then broken down and added to her homepage.
Anna can decide to also manually add a task. Anna can add functions to her schedule. She simply clicks and drags her task into a slot. Anna can also decide to use the app in dark mode if she is more comfortable with that view. She can even change her theme colours if purple isn’t for her and vary her emoji based on how she feels that day.
By compartmentalising her tasks, Anna feels less overwhelmed and in a happier position t begin achieving those small goals to get back on track with a friendly, easy to use, interface.
Watch the walkthrough on YouTube.
Strengths
Briefadoo’s strengths came in the stories of interviews, including Anna. Desk research, case studies, and statistics backed this up, but it was their own words that guided the project.
In the past, I have learnt that a product simplified to one sole purpose can be much more effective than a product trying to give you many things. This drove me to focus on one element for Briefadoo.
This decision was validated with positive feedback from usability testing. In these sessions, participants had voiced no value in some features. This allowed me to focus my time on the main features of Briefadoo.
Weaknesses
Although its main feature had a high value through testing, I wasn’t aware of what other brief parts were necessary.
The separation of the brief from the learning outcomes was a decision I made based on assumptions. The product could have significantly improved with some quantitative research into which sections were essential to a larger audience.
The final product lacked a little in its overall aesthetics. The interface used only one primary colour. The tone of voice and language used should be lively and inviting, little research was done on this, which hindered the overall look and feel of Breifadoo, which will be taken into consideration in the future.
What I’ve learnt
I have learnt that to create a successful product, you need to address specific needs, which only come from empathy. I may have overlooked some aspects of user research or rushed through the synthesising stage in the past. This time proved that spending the time diluting and dissecting the research before jumping into sketching and brainstorming benefited the rest of the journey.
When I did not have that empathy, I would lose focus, question the research, and question the concept. The key findings drove the problem statement that kept me engaged throughout the process, validating why I was there and whom I was helping. After all, that was the goal of the brief and something I am passionate about, designing for others, design for good.
