Project Planner

The Problem

Procrastination is something that is always around and affecting Art students with their work. Although there may be a few people who work more efficiently with their procrastination there are others who it affects and lowers their ability to produce quality work. Learning how you work in the first two years in college and realizing that procrastination is affecting your work enables students to know they need to learn new ways to fix these habits now before reaching the workplace.

 How can Miami university Art Upperclassmen who realize they procrastinate change their habits before reaching the workplace.

Research

Focusing on the Miami students in the Visual Arts Majors. I first conducted a survey with 11 questions asking about how procrastination affects their work and how it makes them feel. 

• Of those who responded 100% said that they procrastinate on their projects.
• They also all wanted to procrastinate less

When speaking with college students about how they keep track of their assignments there were many kinds of answers. Some preferred using a calendar on their phone, others used planners or sticky note lists posted around their work space. I realized that people work and process information in different ways.

Design Process + Testing

The first phase is a phone app that has many functions to track project progress and taking down any thought that could be used for ideation phases.

• The biggest part being the calendar function where students can input the due dates of their projects (using it as just the final due date or inputting progress dates).
• Due dates are color coded in a way to show urgency of the project’s final turn in (red being the most important, orange next, purple and so on.)

This is not the only function of the app either

• There is also a section for just taking any kind of note and quotes that can be used for inspiration
• Included also is a resources page linking to Miami University’s Rinella learning center meant for helping students with their academics and other online sources that can educate the students on procrastination.

Second Phase

• To make this an even more successful opportunity for Miami to lessen procrastination is to collaborate with Rocketbook.
  • Rocketbook creates planners that connect to an app which can scan written items in the planner and then put them into the app
• Creating the connection between physical and digital schedule tracking will help the students even more. Especially for those who can’t work with just one type of functional scheduler and organization.
• Writing reinforces memory while as college students who, more often than not, have their phone on them all the time will profit from this.

Design Solution

Test the Project Planner app by clicking here.

Gillian Jordan