In a 6-person design and development team, we created an app to assist students at UIUC with finding study locations around the campus that suit their different needs. The app was designed completely from the ground up and a functional prototype is being developed in Android Studio.
To better understand the need for this intervention, we began by auditing our experiences of finding study spaces as current students. We also examined the opinions of other students through primary and secondary sources like, Reddit discussions and one-on-one interviews, respectively.
From our initial research, were able to create personas that represent different types of users and study needs within the U of I student body. Based on these personas we created speculative scenarios of how each one might navigate a certain task. These scenarios were useful for guiding the design of our solution.
We also explored the landscape of existing solutions, to help us identify design opportunities. We conducted a competitive analysis of the three most common solutions users referred to during our interviews. Our analysis revealed a number of useful insights that became critical in the design of our solution, including the drawbacks of having a solution for broad and multiple uses, and the benefit of having a dedicated application solely for finding study locations.
Our findings from research and analysis lead us to consider the lack of a dedicated and centralized resource for finding study spaces on the U of I campus, as the design opportunity. So we decided to create Study Buddy in response to that. Study buddy is a dedicated application for finding study spaces at U of I. It is underpinned by an algorithm driven by user behavior, and suggests ideal study spaces unique to users based on learned preferences.
Once we had a working paper prototype, we decided to evaluate the user experience of our first iteration of Study Buddy validate our research insights. We interviews a set of 4 user, each representing one of our three personas. Overall, user found our app useful, however they found the design of some feature unintuitive and confusing, including the "Search by filter" feature, and the "For you" playlist of location recommendations.
Following the evaluation of the paper prototype, we decided to create a more functional high-fidelity mockup in which to incorporate our changes. The mockup, created in Figma, also became a vehicle for designing the brand of the application, and using material design.
Currently the team is hard at work developing a fully functional prototype of Study Buddy in Android Studio. We hope to make the application available for android phone soon.
