Reading Balance App – Konstantin Kirovski

Overview

Contributors: Jordan Alexander, Konstantin Kirovski, Danni Ji, Jiaxi Yan

Nowadays, especially during the Covid pandemic, many students spend more time reading and learning online. The main topic of this project was to examine the balance (or imbalance) between the reading of digital and paper media in students’ lives. After extensive user research, which included contextual interviews, diary studies, co-design sessions, and other research methods, our team has, as a solution to this problem, decided to develop a Reading Balance app. In the whole process, I served as both UX Designer and UX Researcher on the team.

Research

Our project is researching young people’s reading behavior and habits. We choose to focus on how paper media and digital media affect their reading experience. We are interested in this topic mainly because college students spend much time reading from their phones, tablets and laptops for work purposes or in their free time. Under the covid-19 pandemic, more students are working or studying from home which further limited their access to paper media. We speculated that while online formats are beneficial for their portability and access, over-exposure to screens can disrupt sleeping patterns, lead to headaches, expose users to added distractions, and in some cases lead to decreased comprehension compared to physical materials. Further, screen-based reading removes the sensual experiences of physical media and the process of acquiring them. This research is to help us better understand the transition from paper media to digital media and how this transition can reshape young people’s reading behavior.

Human Centered Design process

The main goal during the user research process was to better understand students’ lives and their habits regarding reading in general. At first, we have gathered participants from Cornell University that fit our target audience. When we had enough participants, we proceeded to run both our contextual interviews and diary studies. The whole HCD process was documented by our team, shown in the picture below.

The contextual interviews were run by the script that we made in order to learn more about our users’ behavior. Additionally, we ran a diary study that lasted two weeks, with 3 Cornell students. Both interviews and the study allowed us to gather more information about our participants which was later clustered using the affinity diagraming method (right).

Additionally, based on the interviews and affinity diagraming that we did, we gathered some key insights:

- - - - Digital media is easier to read and certain
        information in a text is easier to find digitally.
        
        Paper media provides more joy to the
        participants and many of them want to
        read it more than they do.
        
        Much more time is spent reading digital media,
        an average of 5 hours between all participants,
        compared to less than an hour on paper media.
        
        Participants already spend a lot of time looking at
        the screen a day and their eyes hurt when reading
        digitally.

After finishing the interviews and a diary study, we have started the process of creating our persona in order to narrow down our problem space.

Final Design

After finishing the whole HCD process as well as the user research, including two co-design sessions that we ran with our users, I have worked on creating a final prototype in Figma for our design solution. Our app had the idea of encouraging the users to read more paper than digital with its’ innovative rewarding system and disabling of online versions of the reading when the reading ‘limit’ is reached. The overall flow of the app can be seen on this youtube link!