Productivity Assistant’s Week 5 — TBD

Team members:

Yuqing Chen, Sharayu Shenoy, Yiping Zhou, Dorian Bizgan

Content:

Research Plan; Interview Script & Exercises; First Week’s Results

Research Plan

User Frame:

Who are the end users that we want to affect?

• Students; TA, RA, Grad Students, Undergraduates, High School Students, teammates
• Academic advisors, Professors

What are the behaviors that we want to affect and where are they taking place?

• The way that users schedules are planned.
• How well they use their time.
• Limiting procrastination.
• The way that people learn
• When people choose to eat, sleep, free time (mental health); suggestions
• How assignments are sent out
• Managing stress
• Having a greater understanding about whether or not the assignment will take too long, or is too short

User Frame

Business Frame:

All potential organization levels that will implement the solution (who will use the work?)

• Schools
• Universities
• Professors
• Students/Individual

What impact do we want to have in the world?

• Being on time
• Limiting stress
• Making people more productive
• Improving a person’s happiness by simplifying a users life

What are the boundaries of our solution space? (Scope)

• Appointment Scheduling
• Prioritization
• Estimation
• Recommendation for break
• Goal / Task Tracking
• The user maintains control of schedule if desired (calls final shots if preferred)

How will we know when we have succeeded? (Metrics)

• Users scheduling is simpler
• High user stickiness of our product
• Takes certain actions into its own hand without negatively impacting users
• The users feel like they have more free time
• KPI-Key Performance for people (tracker of how many high priority items were completed)
• Simple to use — low learning cost

Outline a range of scopes for the solution (what do we intend to design?) Feature, Product, Service, Communication, Environments

• Eating — OFS
• Communication — OFS
• Learning
• Prioritizing
• Scheduling
• Mentoring
• Counselling — OFS
• Canvas / Blackboard

Business Frame

Problem Frame(from user frame and business frame):

• Understand how to help students/TAs/RAs feel easier to schedule their days through new features and service tailored to their needs.

Problem Frame

Research objectives/goals/what you want to learn:

• Who will want this
• What kinds of features do users need
• Whether this is a real demand
• How often will they use this
• Will they want to keep using it
• What will users feel like won’t be useful
• What realms of life they want the assistant to bleed into
• How much input do the users want to provide to the assistant
• Research methods we will use: competitive analysis, literature review

What “prove me wrong data” will we be looking for

• The success of existing applications
• Reason people are not organized is because of a lack of framework.
• Inability to prioritize tasks is the reason that people fall behind.

Secondary research resources you’ll investigate

• Literature review on time management
• Existing products and services( Calendar, to do list, time management, etc.)

Methods of primary research you’ll be using

• One-on-one Interview
• Online Survey
• Journey mapping
• Persona creating
• Contextual inquiry

3-week schedule of events and their owners

Research Timeline

How you plan to collect/record data

• We plan to collect the interview data in form of audio
• The audio data will then be transcribed and collaborated with the team using Google Docs

Interview Script & Exercise

• An introduction about who you are, your goals for the interview, and if you have their permission to take pics, video, or audio

Hi! We are currently studying in UT and are conducting a user study for our class on “Advanced design for AI”. We are working on building an application to increase the productivity of students. We will ask you a few questions about how you organize and prioritize your tasks. We will be using this information to inform our design decisions. Before we proceed, we need to inform you that the interview will be recorded — rest assured that the data will remain anonymous and will not be shared. Do we have your consent to proceed?

• Questions/tasks for understanding your user’s primary and outlier traits

1. How would you describe your organization skills?

2. How prone are you to procrastination?

3. How do you organize your day?

• a. How often do you make schedules?
• b. Are you successful in abiding by it?
• c. How often do you spontaneously make and change plans and how do you work that into your schedule?

4. How long is your attention span?

5. How much time in a day do you spend on homework?

• a. How do you prioritize your work if you have 1 week vs 1 month complete it?

6. How do you deal with time conflicts?

• a. Can you tell us an example
• Questions/tasks for defining their ecosystem of apps, devices, and data

1. How much time on an average do you spend on your devices?

• a. Which devices and how much?

2. Which application do you spend most of your time on?

• a. Doing what?
• Questions/tasks for understanding their journey in solving for your problem space with the current technology available

1. How familiar are you with the technology available to help organize your day?

• a. Have you used any? Which ones?

2. Do you use the Canvas calendar?

• Questions/tasks for understanding their wishes and pain points

1. What annoys you the most about planning your day?

• a. Can you tell us when was your recent trouble about planning an event

2. If you could have someone do it for you, what would you want them to consider while making your schedule? (Features, solutions, factors that you consider as success schedule)

Extra questions for professor / TA / RA

1. How do you organize your meetings

• a. Do you like auto-schedule for the meetings from emails? e.g.Google Calendar auto-create from Gmail.
• b. How do you like it?

2. How do you create the student/research semester schedule?

• a. How much time does it take?
• b. Does the schedule change much over different semesters?

First Week’s Results

• Interview preparation
• Finished 4 Interviews in total

Dorian — (1–2) High School Students | Domestic, (2) Undergraduates | Domestic

Yiping— 1 Research Assistant, 2 Graduate (Ph.D. + masters)

Yuqing — Professor + Aca Advisor + 1 Graduate

Shenoy — 2 Teaching Assistant I International, domestic, 1 Graduate Domestic

• Literature review -TBD

How do people handle multi-task

• Competitive analysis -TBD

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QdUR27cxXYcEyKU-3DDrfaZOw8lIdNwwdFb9bP9YvVw/edit#