I then created journey maps to get my findings and see how users currently try to accomplish their goal.
This first one is an overall overview of what Sam Davies who is a 2nd year Engineering student, and what he does on a day off class. The information from this is based off the primary research that I conducted through user interviews. Because he has no alarm set and no reason to get up, he ends up sleeping in. This could be fixed if he had something to do and a reason to get up, and if he also set an alarm. He skips breakfast and has an unhealthy lunch because he doesn’t know how to cook properly. Instead of doing uni work he ends up procrastinating and ends up just chilling on his phone and watches TV. He does eventually end up doing some work but gets distracted by his phone. To end his day he socialises and goes to bed late, which means that he sleeps in for his class tomorrow.
The next journey map was for Kate, who is a 1st year Law student at Oxford, and walked through a day of studying for her. She begins her day by getting up early and getting on with the day. She feels she needs to get up this early to get all of her work done. After she comes home from class she goes straight into studying, without taking a break. She also makes a quick unhealthy lunch as she doesn’t want to take away from study time, where instead she should enjoy eating lunch out or make something nice and healthy. Because she has an exam tomorrow she needs to revise, but because she done it late at night and she was tired she ends up remembering nothing that she revised.
The next journey map was focusing in on Luke, and walks through how he uses sticky notes on the wall to remind himself of the tasks that he has to do each day. Although it is a really simple process, I found it interesting how there are still issues and some opportunities that come from them. The main issues of using sticky notes to remind himself of what he is doing is that he has to re-write them each day, and he has to be in the room that he wrote the sticky notes to see them and be reminded of them. Both of these issues have opportunities that arise from them, such as having an app that learns you routine and knows what tasks you do everyday. To fix the other problem of having to be in the same room as the sticky notes, a phone notification could serve as a great reminder.
Doing these journey maps showed me that there are at least 2 very different type of users. There is the one who struggles with laziness and needs help with setting and maintaining a routine. The other is someone who is so flat out with university work and because of this ends up neglecting social life and also living healthily. Because of this I need to either find a way to target both of these users, or choose one and target them. Going down the direction of using sticky notes as reminders, it is now time to think of a way to digitise this.