Palendar

A design journey in college student behavior

Overview

 

Background
10-week class project for Stanford University CS 247B: Behavior Design, taught by Christina Wodtke.

Goal
To help seniors strengthen their social connections and form more meaningful connections. Graduating seniors are at a transitional stage in life—soon friends they see around campus may no longer be in their geographical area. Maintaining friendships can be difficult, but the difficulty only increases with distance. By ensuring seniors have strong social connections, they are more likely to stay in touch with friends after graduating.

What
Palendar is an app developed over the course of 10 weeks by Through a rigorous need-finding process, our team discovered a desire from students for more social interaction, but a forgetfulness in making time for it. Palendar allows for easy scheduling of hangouts with friends.

Feel free to explore the Figma prototype here!

Who
Helen He
Safiyah Lakhany
Millie Lin
Erfan Rostami
Ni Yan

When
January - March 2023

Skills
Behavior design, psychology, user research, user experiments, needfinding, prototyping

The design journey

Background research

 

Several members of our project group are graduating seniors. When reflecting on our own personal relationships, we had a desire to strengthen these relationships before transitioning into the next stage of life. This inspired us to further explore the problem space of social interaction. Through various need-finding studies, we were able to narrow our problem space: enabling users to strengthen relationships by easily scheduling social interaction.

Academia research

A key finding from the longest-running study on happiness, the Harvard development study, is that the largest predictor of happiness is personal connection/friendship. Social relationships are an integral part of mental and physical health. With the importance of relationships in mind, we conducted a literature review to further explore the problem space. Key findings include:

  • A study by the International Association for Relationship Research found that the number of hours spent with a friend was a direct predictor of closeness

  • The 5 main relationship management strategies discovered by this study are positivity, assurances, understanding, relationship talk, self-disclosure, social networks, and sharing tasks.

With the studies mentioned above in mind, we set out to find other apps on the market for facilitating friendship. 

Comparative research

We noticed the following:

  • Apps focusing on introducing new people usually tend to have a bigger audience base and expose users to many people. In this segment, we also see a contrarian rise of apps offering highly curated matches based on personal data to cut through the noise of meeting many people. 

  • Apps focused on enhancing existing relationships are divided into 2 categories: 

  1. Tools for making staying in touch easier such as helping with reaching out 

  2. Suggest activities to keep the participants entertained and learning about each other

Our team decided to focus on maintaining existing relationships, since there are many solutions that already exist for meeting new people. A key gap in existing solutions is a lack of focus on in-person interaction: many apps encourage people to interact more in the virtual space, so we want to instead facilitate in-person interaction.

User research

 

Baseline study

Our target audience was undergrad and grad students who were graduating in a year and wanted to strengthen social connections. We recruited 7 such participants from campus based on these criteria to join our baseline study over the course of 5 days.

In order to find out whether our users are more interested in making new friends or hanging out with old friends, the daily questionnaire separately asked questions about participants’ interaction with new people and old friends. Questions include their motivation to socialize, their favorite social activities, obstacles they meet, and how they wish to change. Our goal is to capture our users’ preference for different activities and the core obstacle that we should handle for users.

Synthesis board

Another synthesis board

Personas

Persona 1: Somewhat Awkward Sam

Persona 2: Time-Constrained Taylor

Key insights

We found that both personas want to intentionally or spontaneously reconnect with people before undergrad ends. But the most difficult moment in each persona’s respective journey was different.

  • Time-Constrained Taylor dreads planning the social interaction. They’re excited to meet, but more so frustrated by the back-and-forth logistics texting to actually schedule a time.

  • Socially Awkward Sam suffers during the social interaction.  Overwhelmed and uncertain, they have multiple thoughts at once, unable to enjoy that moment of human connection.

Solution searching: Intervention + assumption studies

 

Intervention study + insights

Based on our research so far, we formed the following hypotheses:

  • Publicizing one’s schedule among friends is a lighthearted expression of interest to connect for the socially awkward

  • Busy people will value the convenience of accessing friends’ availability within seconds.

  • Templates further decrease the effort required to reach out.

Thus, we tested out the above hypotheses in a brief intervention study:

Participants: 5 graduating students (e.g. graduating with undergrad degree, masters, or PhD)

Protocol:

Key insights: We realized that…

  • Participants actually reconnect with old friends. Their friends are surprised but excited to catch up.

  • Opening conversations use standardized language like “It’s been a while… I wonder if you’re interested in…” lending itself to the use of templates.

  • They schedule meals or study sessions, which are things they always do, except now it’s with an old friend.

However...

  • Late reply or no reply happens, but participants are not discouraged. They’ll try someone else. 

  • Participants’ schedules might not work for the friend, and they’ll have to go through painful discussions. This suggests that our app should have a recommendation feature that only pairs up people with shared availability.

Assumption study

From the intervention study, we came up with the following assumptions for a potential project and interviewed a group of fellow graduating students (a mix of undergrad seniors, masters, and PhDs about the graduate this spring).

Assumption 1

Assumption 2

Applying findings to product: We will...

  • (Ethically) install priority and interpersonal closeness in our product’s hangout invites, and to motivate users to respond to invites.

  • Make sure our product allows user to communicate clearly with friends if they want to turn down a hangout request, and the reason why.

Solution building

 

Initial wireflow sketches

Style tile

Usability testing: Issues + fixes

Final prototype

Try it out on Figma here!

Prototype mockups

Ethics

 

There are several ethical considerations relevant to Palendar. While this is only a prototype, it is important that discussions regarding ethics happen early on in the design process, in order to avoid creating potentially harmful products.

Privacy

Privacy is probably the biggest ethical consideration when it comes to our app. In particular, our app allows users to view their friends’ calendars. To address privacy concerns, we designed our app to hide details of their entire calendar (title, description, and location of events). The user only has access to a visual representation of availability (a calendar with blockout times). In the future, an ability to pause calendar sharing with particular individuals could further address privacy concerns. 

Nudging and manipulation

While it wasn’t implemented in our clickable prototype, our team discussed the possibility of adding notifications encouraging users to schedule meetup times. The notification frequency would be determined by user defined goals for social interaction and serve as “nudges.” We made notifications opt-in as an ethical consideration since we wanted to prioritize user autonomy. In Wilkinson’s paper, he calls this “consensual manipulation.” We also want to implement other features to encourage users to schedule more meetup time including access to statistical data (daily averages, graphs, etc).

Accessibility

Due to the fact that our app design is very visual, our clickable prototype isn’t vision accessible. Right now, the process of finding mutual meet-up times is very visual, the calendar relies on colored blocks to indicate mutual availability. This may pose a challenge for not just people who are blind, but people who are low-vision, color-blind, or neurodiverse. An app that isn’t vision accessible is concerning considering that vision limitation is one of the most common disabilities. In order to cater to varying levels of vision, we will utilize audio cues by adding alt text for various elements on the screen.

The impact of this app is on a small scale. Unlike social media apps where you interact with a large range of people (anyone from those you barely know and those you consider your closest friends) in various different ways (sharing everything from life moments to memes to news) this app is less interdimensional. It has a clear purpose: schedule time to meet with your close friends. As a result, the ethical considerations are on a smaller scale, though they remain to be very important since relationships are such an important part of people’s lives.

Conclusion

 

Throughout the development of Palendar, our group gained valuable insights into the importance of social interaction and the role technology can play in fostering connections among individuals. Not only have we identified a gap in the market for an app that focuses on maintaining existing relationships, but we’re making a difference in the lives of people who are similar to ourselves. We gained a lot of insights on how to approach product development. By having a framework for designing an experiment/a pilot for a behavior change we feel a lot more confident in being a systematic thinker in the world of product and startup development.

Given more time to work on the project, we would be interested in investigating further refinements to the user interface and experience. We would also explore additional features, such as integration with existing social media platforms, and refining the onboarding process for new users who don’t have a big social circle on the app. Moreover, we would like to improve the accessibility of the app to cater to users with various levels of vision and other disabilities.

In our next behavior design effort, we will apply the lessons learned from this experience by thoroughly understanding the problem space, conducting comprehensive research, and iterating on our design based on user feedback. Additionally, we will continue to prioritize ethical considerations, such as privacy and accessibility, ensuring that our solutions are inclusive and respectful of all users.

Overall, our experience with Palendar has taught us the value of collaboration, user-centric design, and the importance of addressing real-world problems in innovative and meaningful ways.

Thanks for reading! 📅😀

Cheers, the Palendar pals, Erfan, Helen, Millie, Ni, and Safiyah

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