Overview
Context
LunaFocus
Designed to help students manage distractions, stay focused, and build better study habits.
Helping students stay productive, motivated, and in control
As a university student, I’ve struggled through my fair share of caffeine-fueled late night study sessions. Juggling multiple subjects makes organization overwhelmingly stressful, especially now in the age of social media and addictive algorithms. Wondering how other students struggled and tackled these challenges, I decided to research this phenomenon to identify the pain points students face while studying and how to mitigate them.
The result was LunaFocus, a calming productivity app designed to help students stay on task, manage their routines, and build better study habits through customizable timers, gamified rewards, and a lenient, flexible blocking system.
UX Research for SI 422: Usability Needs and Evaluation
Mobile Design for ENTR390: Digital Product Design
Timeline
August 2024 - December 2024
Insights
Role
Lead UX Researcher & Designer
Research
Initial Objectives
Understand the struggles and strategies of university students studying for exams
Identify how students utilize technology, devices, and online tools to set a study plan and review material
Draw insights to guide development of a tool to help students better manage their focus
Design Methods
Qualitative Interviews, Affinity Mapping, User Journeys, Personas, Sketching, User Flows, Wireframing, Prototyping
To find out exactly what is stunting students, I conducted five one-hour qualitative interviews to identify patterns across technology usage and uncover personal thoughts about study challenges.
For my recruitment process, I outlined inclusion and exclusion criteria to select college students ages 18-21 from varying backgrounds who self-reported struggling with attention span and ineffective study routines. They all use at least computer to study and report difficulty managing distractions and maintaining focus.
I asked participants about their general courseload, study routine, and device/tool usage, and observed them in a 30-minute field study while they worked on school-related assignments. This involved noting their behaviors, website usage, environment, and contextual factors. Observations complement the interviews by offering real-time data on how technology actually impacts focus and productivity compared to how they presented themselves.
Affinity Diagram
I coded all five transcripts by-hand, establishing a general understanding of recurring themes between participants. I then created an affinity diagram to organize each theme, denoted by different colors.
pink = theme
blue = code
yellow = transcript data
I decided on each theme by how frequently it was mentioned by participants:
Positives - positive behaviors or requests
Distractions - mentions of distractions related to a mobile device
Environment - mentions of environmental preference
Device Setup - how participants organized their study space
Mental Breaks - mentions of effective/ineffective study breaks
Deliverables
Persona
Journey Mapping
What Pain Points Do Students Face While Studying?
Our persona Alex indicated that the average university student is highly motivated, but struggles with distractions from notifications and social media, poor time management, and anxiety due to burnout.
Additionally, students are self-aware of their habits, but are seemingly unmotivated to fix them. They will revert to “doomscrolling” as a form of stress relief or procrastination.
“I turn on Do-Not-Disturb, I know in the back of my head I won’t get a notification - [so I pick up my phone] every 10 minutes to [check]”
- participant 4
Students also tended to associate public places of work, their laptops, and tablets with productivity, whereas their bedrooms and mobile devices were associated with leisure and entertainment.
Despite the negatives, participants highlighted that physical activity during breaks, positive reinforcement, and reviewing content with friends elevated their focus and relieved stress.
Research Process
Initial Inspiration
Competitive Analysis
Because phones were associated with leisure rather than productivity, I chose to design a mobile app to occupy the unused space. With these pain points and positives in mind, I began by conducting a competitive analysis on the similar productivity apps Flora, Study Bunny, and Focus Traveler.
Extracting from comment reviews, I decided to incorporate well-liked features and improve upon each platform’s failures. In my initial ideations, I wanted to prioritize…
An illustrated interface with customizable characters and unlockable items to reward users with progress they finish a study session, avoiding an experience that punishes users for cancelling.
An app-blocking system to give full autonomy to students to restrict access to certain apps and grant leniency to others.
An onboarding experience to customize the interface for students’ unique problems.
Positive feedback in the form of encouraging words and progress metrics to keep students relaxed and motivated.
Suggest stimulating break activities to prevent users from resorting to social media.
Lo-Fidelity
User Flow and Initial Prototypes
Mid-Fidelity
Usability Insights for Prototype Refinement
Due to time constraints and a one-week usability testing window, I was advised to simplify the interface and reduce the illustrations to unlockable characters.
Unclear Blocking
Users were confused about what “apps blocked” implied and felt unclear about how they’re blocked and asked about customization.
-> Added an app-blocking stage to the flow to allow the user to lock, block, and set time limits for apps.
Confusing Task Flow
Users felt confused while navigating the session setup, commenting on a lack of nav bar and back buttons. No option to cancel focus session.
Unclear Impact of Onboarding
Users felt that the onboarding tasks did not apply to their focus session setups, and expected auto-suggestions.
-> Added icon app suggestions to the app blocking page
-> Moved the break preferences option from onboarding to session setup for more situational flexibility
Hi-Fidelity
Bringing it All Together
To maintain the cozy, relaxing night-time environment, I chose a calming, fun color scheme of purply-blues and orange-yellows over the more common black and white theme of task management applications as to avoid invoking feelings of pressure on students.
Prioritizing large CTA buttons and organizing hierarchy based on feature importance puts studying at the front of users’ minds — increasing engagement rates using low-effort but highly impactful design solutions!
Intuitive Onboarding
User’s choices help auto-suggest app blocking, break choices, and task management.
Productivity Dashboard
Home page helps users organize tasks, view progress towards unlockable characters, and check on their weekly stats.
Focus Setup
Set a pomodoro timer, invite friends, select a buddy, and attach tasks to your focus session.
App Filtering
Block, lock, and set a time limit for your most time-wasting apps, with auto-suggestions from your onboarding preferences.
On-Screen Timer
View time left, check off tasks, and get positive encouragement with no punishment for backing out of a session.
Reflection
-> Re-arranged the CTA buttons to a sticky bottom navbar to reinforce the main purpose of the app
Future-Thinking
LunaFocus was my first true end-to-end case study, teaching me the value of design thinking and turning real user research into actionable design solutions.
Due to time limitations, I was unable to truly observe students in their complete study process. 30 minutes was not enough time to fully encapsulate the study experience, and I would need to likely sit down for at least an hour observing similar study activities to reduce bias.
Participants may have overstated their effectiveness in study sessions or underreported distractions, which could skew findings. One participant noted afterwards that she felt less inclined her check her phone during my silent field study, revealing a behavioral bias due to the knowledge that she was being observed
Most of my participants were university juniors, with one being a freshman. Next time I should vary my participants or narrow my research focus to target more or less experienced students.
Reflecting, I would narrow my research scope, expand my participant demographics, incorporate longer field studies, and and improve data collection methods to reduce bias and capture more accurate insights into user behaviors.
I regret being unable to incorporate illustrations into the interface due to the project timeline, so in the future, I would like to expand the collection of characters available to unlock, create custom illustrations, add monthly and yearly statistics, and add a friend progress dashboard to encourage friendly competition.