A productivity hub that fosters distraction-free team meetings for college students.
Nobody enjoys an unproductive team meetings! Sway is a product that helps team to minimize distraction unobtrusively during meetings while keeping the members engaging throughout. This product is designed not only to remove distraction but also simultaneously help team to prepare for meetings and build a genuine accountability model.
ROLE
Project Lead
Interaction Designer
DURATION
10 weeks, SPRING 2019
TEAM
Kajal Boghara • Sarah Doncals
Eric Flatt • Austin Lavalley
00 - The Challenge
“Distraction causes nothing but a waste of time”
College students often get many exciting opportunities to work in a team setting for various projects. However, when teammates are not prepared or being responsible, this can easily lead to distraction from side conversations to scrolling on your phone. Distraction can cause conflict and stop tasks from being completed on time.
👉 If you’ve learned enough, check out the final solution
DID YOU KNOW?
An average of 5 hours 3 minutes are spent a week on meetings.
01 - The Goal
HMW create a distraction-free zone during meetings while keeping college students engaging and productive?
Enhancing the team dynamic experience by bringing awareness among teams and notify the distraction in the most unobtrusive way.
02 - Research
Never Fail to Plan.
I believe that it is extremely difficult for projects to have successful results and meet deadlines without detailed planning (but still flexible). I created a spreadsheet so my team could get a better understanding of what needed to be done and where our expertises as individual could play an important role throughout the design and development process.
📊 120 Survey Responses.
Being a designer, I alway enjoy reading through survey responses to empathize with users’ voices. These insights allowed me to envision all the design opportunities for my team.
💻 Secondary research.
Technology, time management, colleagues, human nature: are some of the distraction factors. These information helped me to narrow down the directions that were most feasible to pursue.
💬 21 Interviews.
We interviewed 21 people who were college students that often work as team for school to better understand their behaviors working in team.
”It is always nice to have someone to end all the side conversation and get back to work, like a moderator!”
📈 Competitive Analysis.
We analyzed in depth the S.W.O.T. of different products and services: Monday.com, Balance Table, Luxafor flag. Price, feasibility and availability came up as three factors that we need to consider in our final product.
03 - Concept Development
Design, Test, Refine, Repeat.
I always get extremely excited to see a wall full of sticky notes because that shows me the possible opportunities and innovative ideas that I have right in front of me. My team and I spent hours on affinitization as well as ideating ideas that would potentially address the key insights we found within our research.
Affinitizing with my team.
Testing our prototype with real users.
PROJECT GOALS.
👀 Recognize Distraction.
It is important for target audience to be mindful of the environment and their teammates by being able to voice themselves as well as notifying distraction in a more discrete way.
✅ Agendas and Goals.
Clear agendas and realistic goals help team members knowing what to expect and feel motivated to get things done as well as create a genuine accountability model.
✊ Sense of Control.
Giving users a sense of control allows them to feel connected and passionate about the projects and keep members accountable for their tasks.
🧠 Human Nature.
Humans have a limited attention span (~ 20 minutes) to stay fully focus so a time limit is essential to keep team members stay engaged throughout.
MY RESPONSIBILITY
Exploring mid-fi with mobile vs. web
Physical product
“How does it work?” is always the first question I ask myself and my teammates, when we work on the flow of our products. I always make sure that every element on our final solution is intentional, simple and catered toward the users. For this project, I continuously guided my incredible team to adapt to many challenges came from coding our physical product but still trying to keep the core features of the product that would well address the problem. Therefore, having several backup plans is never a terrible idea for a designer because I always have to prepare myself for unavoidable situations like this. Besides helping my teammates,
Meet Dara - the disciplined
Dara is a 19 years old design student who is currently attending college in Savannah, GA. With many big dreams to achieve after graduating, she is very motivated and always on top of her tasks to produce her best works. However, she often gets frustrated and feels burn out when her teams could not be as productive and engaging due to the non stop distraction that happens during meetings.
🎉 INTRODUCING 🎉
SWAY - Built for Productivity
Sway is a productivity hub that provides a 20 minutes timer. During meetings, team members can unobtrusively tap the device to notify distractions and bring it to the attention of teams by the change of gradual light between red and green. Sway also has an integrated web app to help users organize meetings and check on progress to improve for the future. Sway is coded/created with Arduino and it is fully functional to use!
🏆 Prepare for Success.
Users can easily communicate with teammates to set up new meetings and creating agendas with realistic goals that teams should reach by the end of it so everyone knows what to expect.
⏰ Keeping Meetings Short.
Green light on hub indicates meeting in session and no distraction is happening in the group. After 20 minutes, the hub will turn blue to indicate short breaks and come back for most productive meeting.
🤫 Notify Distraction
No need to worry about offending your teammates! the hub allows you to lightly tap on it when you notice distraction happening in the team. As more distraction has been reported, the light will gradually change to red, showing the team they need to get back on track.
Learn from Mistakes
After meetings, users can access to a full report about their productivity vs. distraction, so they can be more aware in the next meeting about the impact that distraction has on their projects and keep improving.
If you are curious to learn more about this project.
04-Conclusion
Impact on Users.
-Raising awareness of distraction among team meetings.
-Realizing the impact of distraction on team dynamic.
-Improving productivity level.
-Being able to organize and set up clear expectations.
-Accountable for their tasks.
Takeaways.
As a project lead: It was definitely a challenge to manage a team that contained people with more experiences than myself. But I learned that organization and providing clarity can go a long way. I also learned that being a leader is not about managing but also about learning and be part of the process.
As a UX designer: I did not create any working prototype before this course so it was definitely hard to come up with a concept that needed to be feasible and doable at the same time. Through this project I learned the importance of user testing and how those input could really validate your solution as well as being open to improvise when things didn’t go as planned