Case Study: How do we keep track of personal goals with the help of accountability? 🎯
Jiagoon, a study buddy app keeps you up with your goals for college students.
Jiagoon(짝꿍) is a personal project I worked on for about a month. The main goal is to create an app that helps college students to stay committed to their personal goals with suitable partners from the same school.
Role Sole UX Designer (UX Research, UI Design)
Duration 3 Weeks
Tools Zoom, Google Jamboard, Photoshop, Figma
Client Self project
Launch Project here.
We fail to accomplish our goals for many reasons… why?
In the middle of 2022, a friend and I met to celebrate her graduation. Of all the topics, one of them got me rethinking after our date. She told me how it was challenging to stick with a habit to accomplish personal goals or academic challenges; school work has already been chaotic, making it seem like a pressure to commit to the process. Not to mention how frustrated it can get, but seeing others at school achieving theirs, had her feeling more disappointed in herself.
Problem
As a college student, you can easily fall behind as your peers are working on similar goals; how can we break this cycle that has always been bothering us? How can we change our old habits to a new desirable pattern that will get us to where we want to reach?
First Stage — Empathize
📋 White Paper Research
Coming across articles on how to commit to goals, three suggestions stood out to me, whereas I have experienced some of them allowing me to achieve tasks and goals.
- Manage and keep track of every goal that has been made.
Writing a goal down on paper or telling it to yourself every day in the morning won’t help you much if you are someone who procrastinates a lot. A customized tracker app helps you maintain goals with a bird’s view.
2. Frequently monitoring progress by recording and sharing.
According to research published by the American Psychological Association, the more we monitor our progress, the likelihood we will succeed.
3. Having an accountability partner to kick your butt into gear.
A study by the Association for Training and Development showed that if you commit to someone else with your goals, there’s a 65% chance of success, which increases to a massive 95% if you make a specific appointment with another person to report back on your progress.
🧠 Brainstorming
Incorporate a way for users to keep track of their goals by,
📈 Market Research + Competitive Analysis
At this moment, there are more than 50+ mobile apps out in the market right now that are helping people to build habits. Keeping the above statistic in mind, I analyzed the three similar apps surrounding this goal/productivity space. The three mobile apps I chose had the most similar concept according to the above solutions and what I am looking to design.
Three evaluations I choose to analyze are:
How similar are these apps towards the solutions, and what are the features?
What are their downfalls?
How other ways are they helping users to build habits toward their goals?
These great apps all focus on tracking habits with others, from chat community, journaling, setting reminders, and data analysis. Some of them also provided classes to join and even reward systems; most of them are closely aligned with what our goal is for the app.
After this comparative/ competitive analysis, it became clear that my unique value proposition would be sticking with the three ideas from brainstorming. I want to give people control of what they want to work on while having this application as a tool to be as simple and effective in building and maintaining one’s desired habit.
👥 The Users
Before starting to structure questions and interview participants, I want to choose specifically college students in the same school as my primary approach of users for this design. Without all the hassle and competition at work, students and academic environments seem more approachable when finding a partner without competing with each other. Also, having the same goal is more common during school days, working with classmates that had a similar curriculum.
🎙️ Interviews
To understand users before confirming my hypothesis, I interviewed a sample of 5 participants when conducting research. I then synthesized this data into an affinity map that helped me build personas, journey maps, and design ideas.
User Interviews
💡 Here are a few general questions that I included in all the interactions :
- What was the last goal you’ve set that you have achieved?
- Why, how, and what is it that motivates you to start in the first place setting this goal?
- What was the most challenging part of making to accomplish your goal?
- How do you feel during the process?
- What is your process?
- Do you keep goals to yourself or share them with others?
- If you share, how did that feel, and how does it help?
- How do you keep track of your goals?
Analyzing the responses received,
Almost every participant agrees on using a tracker for habits and goals they want to accomplish, stating that they use at least one app to organize events, metrics, or to-do lists daily.
💬 Key Quote:
“ I like keeping track of all my goals, either writing them down or setting a reminder. Sometimes I would take pictures naming a specific album in my photo gallery. That’s usually how I keep track and work towards my goals.”
80% of participants noted they usually share goals they want to accomplish with friends or family members. Creating the same purpose they both wanted to work on helps prevent laziness and also helps boost confidence whenever they feel like they are ahead of their peers.
💬 Key Quote:
“ When you have someone to work together, it’s tough to be lazy. I don’t want to fall behind while everyone got their dream body all worked out, and I’m still coming up with an excuse.”
Other Key Quotes directly from users:
🤔 Insights
Based on the affinity map, I generated the following insights by grouping similar notes under similar headings.
Group1: Reasons for New Goals
Insight 1: Students start a new goal when they want to feel motivated.
Insight 2: Students want to make a difference; whether it’s their appearance or how they live life, they want some changes.
Group 2: How the Process Feels
Insight 1: Students feel too much pressure and get lazy during the process.
Insight 2: Students think they might be overestimating themselves and get frustrated and tired.
Group 3: How having Partners Make a Difference.
Insight 1: Partners give suggestions, advice, different perspectives, support, and compliments.
Insight 2: Partners or peers can be treated as mentors, buddies, and competitors.
Group 4: Tracking Methods and Ways
Insight 1: Students use apps to track processes and schedules, but sometimes they ignore the notifications.
Insight 2: Students would set a goal with their friend in their chatting app, but eventually, that’ll be forgotten later.
Second Stage — Define
💡 Ideation
Combining all the above, I can now synthesize my research and better understand my users and their main frustrations and goals. I have a better picture of what kind of app users might be looking for, also features that will be great to include.
🙋 Personas
Below I created two different User Personas based on the target user group and all the information gathered by the research. These two fictional characters represent the target user groups of the app.
✅ Hypothesis Statements
- I believe it will help boost confidence if user Paula can find a group of friends to work on goals together and stop procrastinating with the group feature.
- I believe it will help increase motivation if user Daniel can achieve on sticking with a new habit by sending evidence to the feed feature to share with partners and peers.
〰️ User Flow
The personas and empathy maps helped us outline a hierarchical task analysis, which we then used to make a journey map highlighting the pain points and the opportunities for improvement.
Third Stage — Ideate
🧩 Brand Attributes
The concept keywords are Lively, Clean, Charming with a fresh color palette, and the latest design trend, Brutalism to give a more enjoyable and encouraging vibe.
🎨 Design Phase
Design System
Low and Mid Fidelity Wireframes
After gathering all ideas and information, I sketched the Low-Fidelity Wireframes on paper. Once I made corrections to them as per iOS guidelines, I moved on to designing these Mid-Fidelity Wireframes using Figma.
Forth Stage — Prototype
Fifth Stage — Testing
📬 Testing and Feedback
After the first wireframe design was complete, I tested the prototype with FIVE representative users to see how user-friendly the applications were. The test was conducted over video calls and in-person interviews, where they were given the following tasks while I observed how they navigated through the application.
Tasks
- View joined goal and post a shred of evidence on to feed.
- Check Explore to find out what others are working on.
- Create your habits or plans with room for others to join.
Here’s a brief overview of the process:
- Explain the concept behind the app to users.
- Ask them to perform benchmark tasks one by one.
- Prompt for feedback after each assignment regarding what went well and what didn’t.
- Analyze testing findings to find patterns within data.
- Integrate designs based on new insights.
I gathered positive responses to the prototype; participants could navigate through the app fairly easily. They could perform the benchmark tasks efficiently, and gave the following inputs on where they got confused and how some steps made it hard to complete.
Feedback to make the experience better:
- I prefer daily progress listing directly on the first page, with which one’s done with today and the incomplete ones.
- I don’t understand the difference between ‘ habits’ and ‘goals.’ Can we have a more noticeable difference or any explanations?
- What is ‘PAX’? I don’t know that’s the short form of participants.
- Some of the introductions and notes are way too long.
- I want to see my rewards first.
Implementing Feedback and final product.
The suggestions from usability testing were considered and the following changes were made.
1
Habits and goals are now more visible as “ Habits” are personal; “ Goals” are those working with partners. Users can find both categories on the home page and also see which ones are done and which the incomplete.
2
Rewards are shown on the topper section in the Mine page since most users prefer seeing rewards as their priority on their profile page.
You may check the final product with this link below.
Last Stage — Final Thoughts
👀 Reflections
This is my first ever UX project that has a heavier data portion on both phases of Empathizing and Defining, the overwhelming amount of POVs definitely gave me more idea of what users are looking for. On that note, there are a few things I’ve learned:
- Changing to another direction might be another better path. Like many participants, I interviewed all came up with reasons and situations that I can relate to it myself, which makes it even harder for me during the ideate stage. I decided to change the way I think, instead of “ why we always give up”, I switch my path to “ what makes us keep going.” That is when the concept of this app became clear. Also realizing not just from the research paper online, but also how people mentioned it during the interview made it more confirmed that I was on the right track.
- Focus more on insight- not process driven. My first version of this case study was full of unclear and confusing designs, while as a designer I want to explain myself why I made these decisions, users may find it unnecessary or miserable. I took all feedback into consideration and came to the final prototype after 4 times adjusting, main goal was to make this fit into a bigger picture. Hence I focused more on the major points in my project, which led me to a more smooth final process, and the project came out well with a better result. I now believe, focusing on the insights will improve my storytelling abilities to others and make it clear for my users.
🧗 Next Steps
If I had more time, and this app is the potential to be fully developed, I would have loved to conduct in-depth ride-along usability studies with various differing experience levels and test the prototype with more functions revealed. This would have me to fully express all my ideas and stick with the main goal of assisting users to achieve different goals within one single app, to confirm whether or not the concept is clear to my potential audience.
As I also receive feedback on UI design such as color usage being too cute for college students, I will maybe adjust that but only despite on what a stakeholder I met requires to their brand.
And finally, I look forward to meeting a team of designers and developers who are experiencing similar concerns, and with whom I can develop the whole application.
Thank you for your time reading my Case Study article. I hope you found it interesting and if you have any questions, make sure to let me know in the comments!
If you have a business proposal or if you want to hire me, contact me via email: tiffanieliang@gmail.com
