User Research Report

Summary

Studying alone can be an isolating experience. When students prepare for an exam or work on a difficult assignment, they often adopt a mindset that they have to go it alone without relying on others. This is counterintuitive and counterproductive, as studies have shown that working with others often helps one problem-solve and overcome mental blocks.

Our team is interested in exploring ways in which we can improve the process of finding study environments and study partners, to motivate collaboration between students and make studying a more social activity. As part of a solution, we would like to optimize the use of study rooms by introducing the idea of open study rooms, where students in the same class or major could get together and study together. A feature that we would like to emulate with our project is Discord activity status, where users’ Discord profiles would display the game they are playing or the song that they are listening to. We believe that this would translate well into promoting study sessions if students could see where and for how long their friends or classmates were studying.

For this project, we decided to scope our target audience to students at the University of Washington (UW). Specifically, we are interested in building a tool for folks who are interested in studying or working with others to improve their productivity whether in-person around campus or remotely.

Methodology

To research the study habits of UW students, we distributed an anonymous online survey consisting of the following multiple-choice and short-answer questions to multiple subreddits and members of the UW community. These questions aim to gain a better sense of the preferences that students have when it comes to finding study environments and study partners, as well as the positives and difficulties that students currently face in their interactions with initiating/facilitating study sessions.

What is your class standing?
How often do you study or work with other members of the UW community?
Where do you typically like to study or work?
Who do you prefer to study/work with? How do you initiate study or work sessions with these groups?
What interactions do you find helpful/positive about studying or working with others in person? Are there any interactions you find difficult/negative?
Are you open to working with other members of the UW community that you might not know? If so, what characteristics would you prefer that these other people have?
Would you be more likely to commit to studying/working for a set period of time if you knew that a friend would also be studying/working during that time? Why? What about a stranger from the UW community? Why?

With the method of online surveys, we can gather a larger amount of responses within a small time frame compared to other methods, however, the depth of responses may be limited. By allowing respondents to be anonymous, they may be more willing to share their honest experiences.

Key Results

We collected 37 responses. Among our research study participants, we identified several trends to align our project with:

Respondents are willing to work with strangers who are taking the same classes or from the same department. Among the participants who indicated a willingness to share a study space with a stranger, they stated that they were less likely to be comfortable and productive in the presence of strangers. They also voiced concerns about having to spend time getting to know strangers before starting individual work.
Initiating study or work sessions is more difficult than finding or agreeing to attend one. Most participants reported that they typically wait for their friends or classmates to reach out to study together. Our project must ensure it does not rely on users’ proactiveness to succeed.
Students feel more comfortable asking questions and bouncing ideas off of each other among their classmates. Participant responses were also reminiscent of the concept of “body doubling,” where individuals feel more productive and focused when in the presence of others. Our project should leverage this feeling of camaraderie among peers to foster collaboration.

Because we distributed this survey online and to our peers who are mostly STEM majors, results may be skewed toward a more introverted profile. Another caveat to our findings is that the survey methodology is prone to self-report bias, which may have resulted in exaggerated responses to questions such as how comfortable they feel around strangers or whether they would be more productive among friends.

Analysis According to AEIOU Framework

Activities: The actions that students take include planning, initiating, and facilitating study sessions.
Environments: We examined the experiences of students for both in-person (campus buildings, libraries, cafes, etc.) and online (Zoom, Discord, etc.) study environments. Depending on the environment, the positives and difficulties that students currently face in their interactions with initiating/facilitating study sessions may vary.
Interactions: The interactions that occur between students include planning, initiating, and facilitating study sessions.
Objects: Technologies such as Zoom, Discord, and other messaging apps are used by many students to find study environments and study partners, and initiate study sessions.
Users: Our survey was distributed to various UW discussion boards and Discord servers and completed by undergraduate and graduate students taking courses at the UW. We aim to gain insight into the processes that students go through to plan study sessions and their preferences for study environments and study partners.

Overall, our user research allowed us to identify a few specific needs of our target audience with respect to improving the process of finding study groups. Namely, students are more likely to wait for others to initiate study sessions, meaning that our solution should require minimal effort from users to find study partners. Furthermore, members of our target user group feel more comfortable among peers who they share classes or majors with, so our project should focus on strengthening existing communities rather than trying to build new ones. Finally, we identified from the survey results that Discord is a major channel of communication used by students, so we may decide to turn our project direction toward that platform to take advantage of the existing user base.