Balancing a Student Lifestyle Re-Imagined
Something I’ve noticed personally, and in many college aged friends around me, is that we all struggle with finding enough time in the day for our school work, social life, and taking care of ourselves. One of these areas always seems to be unbalanced.
So often I see students dedicating all of their time to school work and studying that they forget to take care of themselves. At the same time, some students get so caught up in extracurriculars and their social lives that they don’t have enough time to dedicate to their education.
Not everyone has the time to plan out a detailed schedule every week to make the time for all of these activities. But what if there was a way that all this planning could be done for you? A way that students could go about their lives in a balanced way, knowing that they will have time for all areas of their life? That’s what I set out to do by creating my app balance.
Balance is an app that schedules time for all of these areas based on students’ goals, so that we will see happier, healthier, and more successful students.
Let’s take a look at the app’s goals
The app should provide a suggested amount of time students should be spending in each of the three areas (i.e. 40% school, 30% social life, 30% self-care). It will include a place for students to input their classes and work, any social activities they’d like to make time for, and what self-care they’d like to include. From this, it generates a schedule based off of students’ workload and weekly goals to allow them to have sufficient time in all 3 main areas (school, social life, self-care).
Along these lines, the app would also include an option for students to manually schedule their time in all three areas (or edit the generated schedule). Once the schedule is generated, the app sends motivating notifications when students should be doing different items (i.e. It’s 2pm — You got this! Time to write that paper!). The last main goal is that the app will provide popular suggestions of tasks to add to the calendar (i.e. Need some self-care? Add an hour to go to the gym).
So who needs this and why?
Through a series of interview questions, I conducted some need finding as to how students currently balance their schedules and how that could be improved. 5 out of 6 participants all noted that they’re current balance is causing a negative effect to their performance in school, the value of their social life, and/or their mental health. When asked how they’d prefer to schedule their time, most participants wanted a more clear cut plan and an easy to read/use schedule.
To get a better idea of student goals, let’s take a look at some example UX personas:
Kayla is a busy student who spends much of her time working and studying. She does well in school, but she often feels down and stressed. She spends some time with friends on weekends, but doesn’t spend any time on her own needs and wants. She’d love it if she could make more time to draw and journal, as they’re both activities that relax her and make her happy. For Kayla, her goal is to allow more time in her schedule for self-care.
Kayla may choose to use the app in order to have a weekly schedule generated for her, as she feels she lacks the time to make one. This schedule will also balance time she wants for drawing and journaling. Currently, Kayla does not allot much time to self-care. The app will relieve stress and sadness by giving her time for self-care, as well as school and social life.
Ben, on the other hand, is a laid back student who spends much of his time on the basketball court or with friends. He does mediocre in school, but with college coming up he wants to do better and improve his habits. He’s happy with his social life and enjoys the time he puts into himself at basketball and at the gym. He doesn’t put much time into studying and would like to change this so he can get better grades and feel proud about his work.
As he doesn’t keep a schedule on his own, Ben may choose to use the app in order to have a weekly schedule generated for him. This schedule will also allot time for Ben to do homework and study on a regular and effective basis.
Looking at both Kayla and Ben’s UX personas, as well as the results from my interviews, I was able to put together this comprehensive list of User Stories.
These stories address the goals of the user personas and similarly the user flow below outlines all the views that are necessary to achieve these stories.
Let’s start building
The next step was to wireframe out the whole app. This allows me to plan out the functionality of the app without getting too caught up in the design aspect of it. You can view the full wireframe here.
Feedback for the wireframes was generally positive, with many students agreeing that an app like this would be great for them to schedule their time better. A few suggestions that I incorporated into my final prototype were to include a way for users to import existing calendars as well as send reminders to users when they aren’t dedicating enough time to certain areas of the balance.
Now for the real deal
Using the wireframes as a basis, I then took the app high fidelity with prototypes that the user can actually navigate to get a sense of how the app will work. Check out the first iteration here.
The feedback received from the first iteration was very positive towards the overall look of the app and suggested some small improvements towards usability and states. In the second iteration, I incorporated even more states, improved the back button functionality, reworded some key words, updated the navigation menu, and more.
After multiple iterations, we have the completed prototype. Check it out in all its glory here!
