I optimized student workflows with delightful visual design and behavioral psychology

Overview

The problem

College students find current organization systems inadequate for their needs. Calendars are great to view your day at a glance, but can feel overwhelming to keep up with. Lists are great for a brain dump and satisfying to cross off, but easy to forget and lose.

The solution

Through joyful interactions and positive reinforcement, our proposed solution of merging to-do lists and calendar time-blocking — Buzy — mitigates the stress of an overwhelming schedule and empowers users to maximize their time by streamlining their planning and organization process.

The Solution

Make a to-do

Customize a written to-do by:

• setting a time
• creating a reminder
• adding it to a category
• ranking its priority

Visualize your task list

Drag and drop a to-do into your calendar to block focus time. If a created to-do has a set time, it's automatically added to time-blocking.

Track goals and progress

Visualize and track your progress toward your goals.

Figma prototype

Research

Understanding the problem space

Setting research goals

In the short period of time we had, our team laid out a few research goals to narrow our scope and understand how individuals currently keep track of their daily tasks and their personal wellbeing.

After 3 methods of research

We discovered 3 common themes in our users

Synthesis

Synthesizing and empathizing with our users

User personas

Type A — Time-oriented, ambitious, and organized.

Type B — Relaxed, easygoing, and less stress-prone.

Survey summary

Interview pull quotes

How might we…

Ideation

Ideating design opportunities

A change in direction

Common schedule organization systems used by students

We collected our participants' calendars and planners to see how they organize their tasks based on their personality types. From that, we determined that the most common forms of organization are time-blocking and to-do lists.

Architecture

Information architecture

After narrowing our ideas, we redesigned our information architecture and began wireframing.

Design Decisions

Design decisions

Ex 1 — To-do page

Ex 2 — Editing a to-do

Ex 3 — Positive reinforcement

What users thought…

Visual Design

Design system

We chose yellow as our primary color because it's energizing and radiates positivity. As the strongest psychological color, it plays to our emotions and lifts confidence levels — excellent for getting you into the right mood to produce great work.

Features

Creating a to-do

⭐️'ed are a big focus of mine.

Time-blocking

Goals & progress

In Summary

To-do's

A place to jot down and organize your thoughts when overwhelmed with things to do. Motivate yourself by setting rewards for your goals.

Time-blocking

View your day in specific blocks of time to combat procrastination and set aside time for deep concentration. Get motivated through gamification.

Progress

Set goals and rewards. View priorities at a glance. Check progress using My Journey.

Next Steps

If we were to further develop Buzy, we would…

• Conduct broader user testing by expanding our demographic.
• Create a seamless integration between existing management systems.
• Implement machine learning to auto-generate tasks.

Reflection

Learnings

1. Always prioritize the user

Early on, we found ourselves straying from our users' needs and following our own design aesthetics and preferences. We had to step back, reevaluate, and conduct further research to understand user pain points.

2. Create a flexible schedule

As an independent group project, we realized that creating a timeline and establishing milestones were imperative to accomplish what we wanted in the time we had — while staying open to changing our plans as needed. This was key to a cohesive product we're proud of.

3. Be open to pivoting

Learning how to make design decisions collaboratively was the biggest challenge we faced. To solve our users' pain points, it was vital to stay open-minded and considerate of each other's suggestions.

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