Productivity Mode in Google Calendar
https://www.linkedin.com/in/romapatel410/
Overview
Google Calendar is a tool that many students at General Assembly utilize to keep them organized. For this project, I chose to identify where students struggle the most and create a redesign of the app as well as integrating a new feature to increase workload productivity that allowed more personal time for them.
Problem Space
Students at General Assembly at the New York City campus are very dedicated to their work. They want to do everything they can to ensure their success in their courses, but don’t have a lot of time left for themselves due to the workload. Ultimately, I wanted to design a feature that can be integrated into Google Calendar that can keep students working on their projects and/or homework.
Users & Audience
The focus on the functionality of the new feature is aimed towards NY General Assembly students. They would use the redesigned Google Calendar to timebox how much time they dedicate to a single working session. Many students try to make it a personal goal to keep at least one day over the weekend free for themselves. To accomplish, they need to make sure their work is done in preparation for the next Monday.
Roles & Responsibilities
For this project, I worked independently as a General Assembly student taking part in the User Experience Design Immersive course. I followed the Double Diamond of the UX design process: Research, Synthesis, Ideation, and Implementation.
Scope & Constraints
The entire project took place from October 15th, 2019 — October 24th, 2019. The main parameter was that I need to focus on General Assembly students, and it was better if they were a full-time student in an immersive course. The main challenge I encountered was that my user sample has a very diverse background. I did not meet any two students that were even in the same course. To not let this affect my research, I chose to focus specifically on their productivity skills and how they manage their stress.
The Process
The first stage in the Double Diamond process is to research. To gather my research, I performed contextual inquiries on users gathered around the General Assembly NYC campus. During the interview, I asked questions to get a perspective on how students manage their time between school life and personal life, such as:
- How long did it take you to complete your last homework assignment?
- What do you do to give yourself some personal time outside of class?
- Has taking your course caused you to sacrifice your personal time?
To begin synthesizing all the data, I created an affinity map. Each post-it note color represents a user, and each note contained statements that described the users’ behavior and thoughts. After grouped by similarity, these “I” statements emerged:
- I like tools that are user responsive.
- I have preferences with how I organize.
- I prioritize personal time.
- I take time to commute to class.
- I focus more on work than my meals.
- I value being productive with my homework.
- I use digital interfaces to organize.
- I do not have stress from my time at General Assembly.
Some insights are that students are not getting as much work done as they want to, they aren’t making enough time for themselves, and they get distracted easily. After the affinity map was organized, I created a persona that would represent my entire user sample. As an overview, the persona, Melissa, is 26 years old, has a half an hour commute to GA, and is taking part in the Software Engineering Immersive course. She loves being part of the community at GA but she wishes she could have more time for herself. Using this persona, I was able to create a problem statement to move forward in how I want to solve the users’ problem. “Students need tools to organize their schedule to allow more productivity with their homework. Melissa takes several hours to complete her homework and has difficulty making more time for herself in her schedule. How might we keep her school and personal life balanced while still ensuring her success in her course?”
Design
Beginning with a low-fidelity wireframe, I thought to create a process in which the user can select an event on their Google Calendar and use it in a timeboxed work session that I called, “Productivity Mode.” The user would select a time frame that they can sit down to do work in and decide how long they want their breaks to be. Every 20 minutes, a timer will go off, letting the user know that they should take a break and resume when their custom break duration expires. Young adults have an attention span of about 20 minutes, so this will ensure that the user is maximizing their productivity and doing so efficiently within their own time frame. While performing usability tests on the low-fidelity wireframe, many users did not understand how to begin since the home page looks exactly like the original Google Calendar interface. They also had difficulty in choosing which times to work between since all the events were set in the calendar. Moving to the mid-fidelity prototype, I changed the scenario so that users have a direction to use their studio time specifically as their productivity session. They were still to continue to find a way to get their work done on October 18th to be able to have a free weekend. This change formulated positive results allowing users to successfully create a new productivity session within Google Calendar.
Outcomes & Results
3 out of 3 users were able to create a new productivity session with minor issues. 2 out of the 3 users do not like to use productivity applications at all. My main finding from my final usability testing round was that the users did not like the idea of scheduling their breaks. It feels unnatural to them. The next steps in bettering this feature include putting more emphasis on the work session rather than the breaks, allowing the user to schedule future sessions, and creating a hi-fidelity prototype to give the user a realistic experience of the app in its full functionality.
