Productive, Accessible and Fair
Our Idea : Productivity Assistant
As a grad student, I never have nothing to do. Nonetheless, I always find time to do nothing(nothing productive at least) at the expense of my sleep.
A few years ago I came across a Ted Talk by Tim Urban who said:
Within the mind of a procrastinator exists a Rational-Decision Maker and along with him, an Instant Gratification Monkey. The rational-decision maker in your brain will make a rational decision to do something productive but the monkey does not like that plan so he takes the wheel and you end up in a YouTube spiral… but the procrastinator has a guarding angel, who the monkey is afraid of — He’s called The Panic Monster
This resonated with me and I revisit it every time I feel things are starting to get out of hand and to keep the Instant Gratification Monkey in check. However, after talking to a few friends I realized that for some, it is only the Panic Monster can keep the monkey in check.
So what better idea to implement using AI than one which wakes the Panic Monster and helps you stay productive.
Addressing Potential Biases
There are multiple implicit biases that influence design. Below, I have mentioned two such implicit biases who’s mitigation is extremely crucial to our product.
Making plans is easy, it’s sticking to them that’s difficult.
Even with the wide variety of features that motivate you to get your work done, there can be various reasons because of which even though motivated, it might be difficult to stay on track. A potential bias that we need to be mindful of, while designing the product, is that the Attention Span of each user is different. It is not uncommon to students to suffer from disorders related to attention deficit like ADD/ADHD. The algorithm should be able to pick up on these nuances and give the user sufficient breaks and engage the user with different small tasks rather than one big task with breaks.
Larks v/s Owls — It’s not a competition.
Despite various studies that show some people work better at night, it is expected from people to work during the day. This expectation translates into the design of everyday products. The distinction between night and day is too dramatic. People usually have a “window of high productivity” that may fall anywhere in a 24hr day. Given that the ultimate goal of our application is to be productive, the application must be flexible enough to recognize patterns and prioritize challenging tasks within that window and not be limited by daylight for people who work better at night — not to be confused with people who are forced to work at night.
Being Accessible
Since this application, for now, is targeted towards students, accessibility will play a huge role in design considerations. Mobile and web applications have set of design guidelines. However, given that we are still in the ideation phase of the product, we have not yet determined if the product will be an application that will reside on existing devices or be a device on its own.
Irrespective of the nature of the product some considerations would be
- Sufficient color contrast
- Ability to provide Voice and Text as input and output.
- Ability to customize font sizes
