ClockOut: Activity Tracker and Time Management Tool for Students
Introduction and Motivation
When deciding on what kind of application to create we first assessed the target population that we wanted to affect. Seeing as this was an undergraduate project at UMD, we chose the local community of College Park and its students as motivation to serve our ultimate target audience: college students. Especially in the asynchronous academic environment, there has been a greater burden placed on students to organize their learning and study time on top of managing assignment due dates. This can lead to an overwhelming set of responsibilities that can lead to student burnout. Studies have shown student burnout leads to poorer sense of academic direction (Atalayin et al,2015). Students with high levels of burnout report less academic satisfaction and academic achievement (Atalayin et al,2015). As a result of experiencing the problem of student burnout firsthand, we chose to address the health issue head on to positively impact the daily lives of our prospective users.
Competitive Analysis
Monday.com is a direct competitor who has a very complete product on the market. While Monday is great at providing task oriented progress and data, it is expensive for an individual user to access. This app is designed mainly for collaborative work as it allows multiple users to create and edit content. This app falls short in that all of the data has to be manually inputted into Monday from the users proprietary coursework app. Monday fills a very niche, professional productivity need, but falls short in terms of practical use and cost effectiveness for college students or individuals looking to manage their time.
Our second competitor RescueTime has many features similar to our design and likely offers the closest resemblance out of our competitors. RescueTime’s shortcoming comes from its inability to automatically receive data input from common course work websites, making it inefficient to use as a study productivity tool as consistently copying information over from Canvas is redundant. The way the app logs information on activity could be far more insightful if it could work in conjunction with the information present for each course as opposed to the general labels that RescueTime has available. It also has very weak mobile availability and can be pricey depending on the option a user chooses to utilize.
Our third competitor is Flora, which has some unique productivity features. Where Flora stands apart from the pack with its sleek interface and easy to use design, it lacks in the amount of features it has available to users. Like many productivity apps on the market, it is more centered around providing specific productivity features rather than offering a full, comprehensive product specific to a certain field. Flora has simple to do lists, allows users to connect with friends and track progress, and has a feature that essentially tracks one’s consistency over time. The consistency is Flora’s best and most marketable feature for its users. As users complete certain tasks, their ‘garden’ grows and continues to branch out. This feature is designed to help users stay engaged and to try and help them visualize progress. It also ties into the friends feature, as friends and people one connects with can see your progress. While this is the strongest feature, it’s arguably the only feature that sets it apart from other, very simply designed apps and interfaces available trying to accomplish the same goal.
Design Problem and Target User Group
The application that we developed is a multimodal activity tracker and planner that can be accessed through the IOS and WatchOS platforms. Our application is catered toward students who are studying and doing coursework with a number of features that increase productivity for the user most notably our canvass integration.
The purpose of the application is to avoid burnout when studying or completing coursework. The application is designed to keep track of a specific amount of time the user has spent studying, which can be edited to the users preferences. After the time has passed the application instructs the user to take a break before resuming their work. This follows the methodology of the Pomodoro Technique that distributes 5 and 15 minute breaks between every 25 minutes of work completed.
As we learned throughout the course, users tend to forget to use productivity apps or devices of that nature when all the updates and interactions are entirely manual. A key feature about integrating Canvass into our design is that it can automatically keep the application updated with all relevant coursework in order to accurately schedule and notify the user of these upcoming assignments. We created a number of additional pages that complement this automatic updating feature such as a schedule, calendar, and key words page that allows the user to give priority to assignments under a certain name.
Final Version of Prototype
Figma: https://www.figma.com/file/n9SZyJpztlTpohudKjfQMP/G8-ClockOut-Final-Wireframe?node-id=0%3A1
Future work
For future work we can definitely expand platforms and add a desktop version that could be downloaded on the Microsoft store. This desktop version of the application could better suit some users for activity tracking and app restriction, especially for those that may do a majority of their work on a computer.
Conclusion
The application that we designed is meant to increase the productivity and efficiency of college students when they are studying or otherwise completing coursework over extended periods of time. The implementation of the automatically updating Canvas API in conjunction with the several auxiliary pages constructed grants the user versatility in how they want to use the application. Additionally, push notifications are incorporated in the applications features to incentivize the users to keep working on the goals they have set for themselves within the app. Whether it is used to pace out coursework over the semester or simply to remind students to take a break every once and a while, our application is designed to maximize the efficiency of the users work experience.
Reference
Atalayin, C., Balkis, M., Tezel, H., Onal, B., & Kayrak, G. (2015). The prevalence and consequences of burnout on a group of preclinical dental students. European journal of dentistry, 9(3), 356–363. https://doi.org/10.4103/1305-7456.163227