Improving Group Work Efficiency

Our Project

The Course Collaborator app was designed to help alleviate the stresses and anxieties that students are all too familiar with regarding their everyday group work. While we like to think that the application of technologies in our group work brings about greater productivity, our primary research revealed that this was far from the truth. The existing disconnected and incomplete nature of many digital workspaces simply leaves students frustrated and burdened. Students fail to leverage the full potential of many digital workspaces because there are too many barriers to the use of various features. For example, we found that students would rather engage in a burdensome process of sending back-and-forth text messages to find the most ideal meeting time rather than utilizing collaborative calendars or other poll-based features. This was just one of the many frustrations we identified, and we knew something had to change.

Our team sought to create an app that would unify the most fundamental features and functionality that undergraduate students desire for their routine coursework. What resulted was Course Collaborator, an app that supports multiple groups, each with its own interactive timeline that assists with group chats, meeting scheduling, file editing, and other interactive poll-based features. Each group also has its own collaborative calendar that assists with meeting creation that is partially automated to find the most ideal meeting times that fit into everyone's busy schedule. There is no longer a need for students to stress about other group members not pulling their weight, as the interactive kanban board can help manage tasks, track completion, and keep members accountable.

We created a series of prototypes and engaged in a process of iteration at each stage in the project to perfect our product. Whereas we were solely focused on the high-level organization of the app’s intended features while sketching our low-fidelity prototype, the creation of high-fidelity prototypes on Figma allowed us to further delve into the app’s aesthetics, navigation, and interactions. We employed a series of cognitive walkthroughs that revolved around the four major tasks featured within our app to identify potential pain points that end users would experience. We further analyzed our prototype and collected feedback through a series of user studies. Changes were made to the placement of various buttons, the descriptiveness of instructions, as well as the inclusion of previously omitted features. Furthermore, we polished the fluidity our prototype by improving the animations between screens and constructing a more consistent navigation.

Click the link below to continue exploring our prototype in Figma.

Big Points

• Provided students with a more efficient method of creating/joining new groups
  
• Promoted accountability with the inclusion of a Kaban board that manages task delegation and tracks completion
  
• Automated meeting scheduling through poll-based features as well as an interactive collaborative calendar
  
• Improved the accessibility of file editing and video calling, each of which are fully integrated within a singular workspace rather than requiring the use of external platforms