In my role as the UX designer and Project Manager in the group project, I helped create a centralized notetaking application for students.
From ideation to testing, I was in charge or researching and interviewing the current demographic, developing storyboards, wireframing, prototyping, and pitching the design to the class at the end of the project
Universal Notetaking Interface (UNI)
With the broad topic of discovering a gap in customer demand and solving it, we turned to current student struggles, which developed into an interactive and centralized notetaking application.
The experience allows students to have access to multiple notetaking methods, from flashcards to recoded lectured notes, in an effort to make the user experience simple. It also acts as a centralized app for all notes.
Our objective was to architect and design this idea from scratch and present it to our stakeholders.
goals and challenges:
Van Meter, Yokoi, and Pressley (1994 : 323)* show that students take notes in lectures because of these reasons:
It increases their attention to lecture
It increases their understanding of the lecture content and helps retain it in their memory
It provides connection between ideas
It informs specific points repeated in class
*Van Meter, P., Yokoi, L., & Pressley, M. (1994). College students’ theory of note-taking derived from their perceptions of notetaking. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86 (3), 323-338.
However, in the $897.7 million market for notetaking apps based on data collection in 2018, there are over 200 app types. What would distinguish ours from the rest?
While notetaking apps help support digest content and improve studying habits, current notetaking apps focus on niche notetaking mediums that doesn't fit everyone's notetaking style and scatters the notes throughout multiple apps.
But what if the notetaking experience can target a wider demographic? Could that attract more users while maintaining the core need to customize to user individual need?
We want to provide a universal notetaking app that focuses on the customers' need to personalize their studying habits.
discovering opportunities:
To better understand the current target demographic, we sent out Qualtrics surveys as a way to interview our target users. The interaction allows us to gain user insight through their current frustrations and needs.
I also created a competitive analysis of current popular notetaking applications. I compared three notetaking apps (Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, and Google Keep)
After conducting research on the current needs of students, we compared it with project expectations to develop the best understanding and alignment to user insight. Based on our results, we developed a storyboard as the initial prototype of the product.
guiding principles:
We had 3 leading principles that we gathered through our user insight and project goals. The product has to be:
flexible:
We want to ensure there are many different options for students to personalized their notetaking app, which best matches their notetaking style.
centralized:
When we interviewed users, they emphasized the lack of a centralized platform for all the different types of notes. They felt like their notes were scattered all over the place, making it difficult to find notes when they need to.
universal:
While looking through the competitive analysis, none of the tools prioritized including accessible tools when notetaking, so we want to provide accessible notetaking options that includes more demographic populations.
turning ideas into UX answers
With our sketches, we turned scenarios into design prototypes. Through several iterations, we updated wireframes, conducted user testing, and redefined products to their suggestions. After implementing solutions, we combined user responses to the final prototype.
shaping design decisions to encompass guiding principles
flexible:
-by creating four different types of notetaking types
-giving them the ability to transfer notes to a different notetaking medium
centralized:
-by providing the different types of notetaking types so users don't have to bounce between apps for specific templates
-multiple ways to customize their homepage and folder structure
universal:
-providing options that extend beyond traditional handwritten notes
-including speech writing and speech to text options
With the initial "tour" of the app, users can quickly familiar themselves with the features, prioritizing intuitiveness. Users can skip the tour if they want to individually explore the app as well.
uni apps.mp4Users can choose between 4 different types of templates that best fit their needs.
It is also easy to share notes with fellow classmates or friends with a single click of a button. The notes can be shared with users who use or don't use the app to make it easily transferrable.
By adding an extra option for recording lectures, we give the user more flexibility to take the desired notes while also keeping accessibility in mind.
what I would do differently:
Due to restricted time and resources, we couldn't try new prototypes after two iterations to continue to improve the product. If I had the option to continue this project, I would:
We only had time to focus on the speech to text function, but I would want to focus more on the different design functionalities including accessible text font and size.
We only had a week to collect data from the users, I want to spend more time reaching out to different demographic types to get a more holistic target population.
I only had time to compare three different notetaking apps. I would want to look more into more niche competitors.