Phase 1

Roles:

Project Manager: Lauren Hruza

Research Lead: Sean McGranahan

Design Lead: August Wang

Prototype Lead: Chai Zhang 

Evaluation Lead: Muhammad Al-Atrash

Reporting Lead: Muhammad Al-Atrash

Research

PROCESS

We entertained many ideas for how we wanted to conduct research. Since we had already done a survey for Phase 0, we thought finding articles related to our specific social network problem would be a good place to start. We found a large amount of articles and researches detailing the challenges faced by people trying to make friends, the risks of social isolation, and obstacles in collaboration. Then we looked at the benefits of collaboration– from improved health to a more fulfilling social life to higher productivity–and ways collaboration is generally done(virtually or in-person) to get a feel for what people normally do and how our app can help. Digging deeper showed us that there are many apps out there that facilitate collaboration, but very few that help find others to collaborate with, and the ones that are out there are not well-known. This gave us the confidence to move forward with brainstorming solutions.

RESOURCES

• UVA Admission Statistics: https://admission.virginia.edu/admission/statistics

• ACHA-National College Health Assessment II: https://www.acha.org/documents/ncha/NCHA-II_FALL_2017_REFERENCE_GROUP_EXECUTIVE_SUMMARY.pdf

• N.a., Gixnux: https://blog.gitnux.com/making-friends-in-college-statistics/

• Ha Le, Jeroen Janssen and Theo Wubbels, Cambridge Journal of  Education: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/0305764X.2016.1259389?needAccess=true&role=button

• Alastair Gaban, Torrens Univerity Australia: https://www.torrens.edu.au/blog/the-5-big-benefits-of-studying-with-friends-and-how-it-could-save-you-money 

• Janice M. McCabe, University of Chicago Press: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo24731955.html

FINDINGS:

We aimed to create a networking app exclusively for University students, focusing on facilitating study sessions while prioritizing security and user-friendliness. Our goal was to offer a straightforward yet feature-rich solution to enhance student interactions both within and outside of their academic environment.

Forming friendships can be a challenge, particularly at the University of Virginia, where 32% of students come from out-of-state or abroad, and the remaining 68% originate from various regions within Virginia. Alarming statistics indicate that 64% of college students felt "very lonely" in the past year, with 60% experiencing increased loneliness and isolation due to reduced in-person interactions during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a 90% rise in depression rates. Moreover, research shows that teenagers value their school as a significant place for making friends, with 87% of teens having close friends from diverse backgrounds. A study conducted at Utrecht University identified common obstacles to collaboration, including a lack of communication skills, uneven contributions among collaborators, perceived competence status, and distractions stemming from friendships.

Collaboration and friendship play vital roles in students' academic success and well-being. Studying with friends can reduce stress, boost self-esteem, and lead to better academic performance, as evidenced by research indicating lower cortisol levels and higher self-worth in the presence of friends during stressful events. Students who study with friends tend to be more motivated, retain information better, and engage more actively in their studies. Positive peer interaction significantly impacts academic development, knowledge acquisition, and self-esteem. Additionally, research suggests that active, social, context-driven educational experiences promote deeper learning.

Several collaborative apps and websites are available, such as Microsoft Teams, Piazza, Google's shared drive, Reddit, Discord, Meetup, and Facebook groups, but they often assume pre-existing group connections. While a few apps like Mooclab and Studdy facilitate finding study partners, Study Buddy is the most similar to our solution. Although it may not fully live up to its claims due to its single developer origin and hasn't been updated since 2015, it shares our core idea of connecting students. Study Buddy serves local students seeking tutoring, assistance with assignments, or an academic community. Users can search for local students or tutors in their courses, communicate through a chat feature, and arrange meetings. We are encouraged to see others addressing the same problem, as a satisfactory solution has been lacking.

In the article titled "How to Make Friends and Cultivate a Social Life," the author outlines a foundational approach to forming friendships, involving positioning oneself in social environments, initiating conversations, and maintaining connections with like-minded individuals. However, these steps can be challenging in a sprawling university setting. Brain Buddy addresses this challenge by creating opportunities for interactions. We place all students in the same class within a large group chat, encouraging discussions on common queries, assignments, and collaboration. Additionally, students can organize group study sessions and extend invitations to their peers. Furthermore, our app offers a buddy matching quiz, allowing participants to answer questions and connect with potential friends who share common interests and availability schedules.

Design

PROCESS

Our design process for Brain Buddy commenced with a collective identification of a pressing issue—social isolation among University of Virginia (UVA) students. First, we dived into extensive research and analysis to gain deep insights into the problem's nuances. Following this, we engaged in individual brainstorming sessions, generating potential solutions. Our subsequent group discussions involved the evaluations of these solutions, the first of which is to provide profile matching features for students to make friends with similar interests and same courses, and the second of which is to facilitate study groups after classes through an online social platform, weighing their feasibility, potential impact, and alignment with project goals. After this assessment, we collectively selected the two most promising solutions, but instead of choosing between them, we decided to merge these ideas to create a more holistic solution. This pivotal decision led us to create a detailed design blueprint, mapping out hardware components and their interconnections. We then sketched the application's interface, offering a visual representation of the user experience. Through prototyping and user feedback sessions, we fine-tuned our design, paving the way for an iterative improvement process that ensures Brain Buddy continues to evolve and effectively addresses the issue of social isolation, providing UVA students with a comprehensive platform for meaningful connections and enhanced university experiences.

Design Features and Rationale

Design Artifacts

Prototype

PROCESS

We decided to prototype using Figma. It is a very powerful tool for wireframing, prototyping and creating interactive elements. We first started with basic wireframing. We first placed several smartphone frames reflecting the rough sketch, focusing on the basic structure, layout, and content placement. Although not required for a low-fidelity prototype to have fonts and colors, we’ve already established a style guide for Brain Buddy, thus the actual prototype is created with the Brain Buddy style guide in mind. After we have all the frames created, we begin envisioning logical flows between each screen to support user tasks. We designed and added the navigation structure, including search functions, buttons and other interactive elements. Lastly, we shared the prototype to our evaluation lead Muhammad for feedback and evaluation.

PROTOTYPE FEATURES

Brain Buddy's primary function is to foster collaboration and connection among college students. In phase 1 of our development, we concentrated on implementing features that enhance this functionality. These features include automated enrollment in chat groups for their respective classes and clubs, creating an environment where students with shared interests can interact. In addition to the large class and club chat groups, we've introduced a feature that enables students to schedule study or activity sessions, inviting their peers to join them for collaborative study sessions or just asking if anyone would like to go together to the next general body meetings. Moreover, each student profile features "profile tags" that showcase the student's interests and hobbies, enabling anyone who visits their profile to gain insight into their passions.

INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPE:

Link to the Brain Buddy Interactive Prototype

Evaluation

PROCESS

Our prototype lead worked closely with our design lead to develop the inital prototype. They presented the finished prototype to the rest of the team for first impressions as well as evaluation. The first step of our evaluation process was to clearly outline what we wanted to achieve through our evaluation. Our primary objectives were to assess the usability of our prototype, identify design flaws, and verify if the app addresses the problem of social isolation/enhancing collaboration among college students effectively. 

The next step of our evaluation process was to define a set of usability principles as guidelines for our evaluation to ensure that the user experience of Brain Buddy was an overall positive experience. The usability principles our group prioritized was: 

1) Aesthetic and Minimalist Design: ideally, our product should be visually pleasing, but not at the expense of functionality. Additionally, avoiding unnecessary elements can help prevent user confusion. 

2) Help/Documentation or an Easily Accessible User Tutorial: ideally the system should be relatively self-explanatory but on-demand help should be available to users as necessary 

3) Flexibility of Use: the system should be easy to use for both unexperienced and experienced users, providing shortcuts that allow users with more experience to perform tasks more efficiently

4) Consistency: the system should follow established conventions/design elements that are consistent throughout the interface (i.e. there should not be different words that represent the same thing)

With these guidelines established, we went through our prototype step by step, interacting with it as if we were the user. Throughout this process, we paid close attention to how well our prototype adheres to our defined guidelines. 

FINDINGS

Our initial impression was that the prototype had a visually pleasing and minimalistic design. While aesthetic evaluation is by definition subjective, the app contains a consistent color scheme of relatively neutral colors (white, blue, and turquoise). Additionally, everything is done in a sequential manner, making the design minimalistic while not compromising the user functionality. First, the user enters relevant information (courses, clubs, interests/hobbies), then the interactive chat system appears (offering the ability to either discover new friends or organize a study session), then depending on the user selection additional functionality is revealed (such as information relevant to organizing a study session or accessing user profiles to discover new friends). This sequential layout is helpful in reducing clutter in the interface, and does a good job of not overwhelming the user by providing immediate access to the full functionality of the app.

Additionally, the app provides relatively flexible ease of use and grants the user high levels of control by its sequential design, allowing users to easily backtrack or skip steps. Since user authentication/profile generation should be a one-time process, once the user has created an account, an experienced user can easily navigate through the interactive chat system to either meet new users, organize a study session, or chat with existing friends. 

We also asked friends who are also college students to try our prototype and asked them for feedbacks on the current interface, interactive components and overall experience using the app.

We received the following inputs:

• Positive reponses on the aesthetic of the app interface, describing the app as "clean", "nice", and "simplistic".

• The course selection button should be expanded so that clicking on the course name (and surrounding area) should select the course, instead of limiting the scope of the click to the smaller check box.

• Confusion on the functionalities of some icons and buttons.

• Commas in the example texts show in the course selection search bar can imply that search words must be entered in a certain format/order (i.e. course, professor, subject).

• Inquires on whether certain information in profile can be privated or hidden to the public.

• The format of the study session discovery interface is too busy and resembles a news app.

Based on our own evaluation and feedbacks from users, we concluded that while the app is relatively straight forward to use and quite self-explanatory, our prototype does not currently support a tutorial to provide help to users. This should be addressed as some features (such as viewing other users profiles or creating new study sessions) might not be as straight forward as the profile generation process. Additionally, some users (while unlikely in the Gen Z digital era) might have limited experience using social networking apps, and so our group feels it is important to not compromise the user experience for those users. In conclusion, our evaluation has provided valuable insights into the strengths and areas for enhancement in our prototype. By addressing these findings, we aim to refine Brain Buddy further and make it a more user-friendly and effective solution for college students seeking to combat social isolation and foster collaboration.