Context

The literature on academic stress highlights that social interactions among college students are one of the most important contributors to stress in an academic environment. Access to university involves several periods of transition that may require significant adaptation, cause distress, and affect the mental health and well-being of young people.

Understanding the problem space

To begin addressing the research question, we focused on young students in their first years of university. We conducted interviews with the objective of understanding their context, the experiences they are living through, and the challenges they face in managing their emotions during this period of transition and changes.

Final Insights

When working in teams, students face high levels of stress and anxiety. Students have difficulties managing their collaborative activities, handling their delivery times, and creating a sense of collective responsibility. Students want to achieve quality work, collaborate efficiently and reduce their stress.

The problem

Our User

Before starting to ideate our solution we created Jose Maria to understand how our audience sees themselves, empathizing with their context, problems, needs and motivations.

Ideation

✧ We conducted a divergence exercise for idea generation, and a convergence exercise for decision-making.

✧ With this exercise, we chose the most innovative and feasible ideas and arrived at our initial solution.

Initial Solution

Collaborative management platform that uses a virtual pet to promote teamwork. The team unites efforts to maintain the pet's well-being, which promotes shared responsibility and reduces collaboration-related stress.

With this proposal, our objective was for students to establish a special bond with their virtual pet while benefiting from a task manager designed to alleviate the team's workload. Ensure the virtual pet's well-being through students' commitment to its care.

Low fidelity

We conducted two low-fidelity prototype iterations with 5 participants in each iteration, after defining the user flow in our application. The objective was to perform usability and concept testing.

We created interactive prototypes for each user flow. During the tests, participants performed various activities and exercises in our prototype, providing us with initial feedback, identifying blockers and improvement ideas that we implemented in the next prototype phase.

High fidelity

After completing the low-fidelity prototype, we moved on to building the high-fidelity solution. The objective of this model is to show the solution as close to reality as possible. We started using pre-built UI elements and organically began creating and adapting our own UI Kit in the prototype, which we will see later.

The iterations consisted of a guerrilla-style test and a UX writing design critique where in both cases we captured the reactions, comments, and suggestions from the interviewees to apply to our next prototyping stage, the final product.

UI Toolkit

In our project, we developed a style guide to ensure visual consistency. We opted for organic shapes that convey adaptability, unity, movement, globality, and reliability, avoiding the coldness of rectangular forms. Regarding colors, we chose purple for its association with fantasy and creativity, complemented by soft tones that evoke sensitivity and empathy.

Following the atomic design methodology, we identified, prioritized, and created atoms, molecules, and organisms elements. This way, we created a guide of +50 scalable and reusable component symbols.