Edu-tainment
Entertain with goal to overcome procrastination.
Let’s tame your monkey mind!
Magical Garden is a conceptual edutainment mobile app, which is one of my projects in my design psychology lesson. Magical Garden provides people with social, emotional and cognitive experiences that are compelling, immersive and beneficial to finish their tasks. It is designed for countering procrastination, a common psychological problem.
This project mainly focuses on academic research and the study of how to apply pleasure frameworks. The following is my refined design regarding this idea.
The Problem and The Solution –
The Problem
Monkey mind is hindering you! The idea is derived from the application of different pleasure frameworks to solve some psychological problems. When I was in university, my classmates and I were overwhelmed by the loads of assignments and deadlines. We refused to start the assignment until the last minute came. However, there may be more than one submisson deadlines. What we can do is just to rush all the tasks, the output may not be satisfied. In fact, we should have more time to do it better, if we can tame our monkey mind!
The Solution
Several pleasure frameworks were designed to apply into this conceptual app.
[Gamification]
A compelling gamification experience can step into human emotion, for example completing tasks, collecting points and unlocking new features, which can help people who are suffering from procrastination to finish tasks easily. People will be easily immersed into games, just like Hero’s Journey. They will be the hero to overcome challenges.
[Self-directed learning]
When we have completed a small task, our brain will release small amounts of dopamine. This is already enough to motivate us to keep finishing more tasks. Regarding Bloom’s taxonomy, the target is not only to let people stay at completing goals, but also to let them be trained to be self-driven or even looking back into how to improve their learning process.
[Social Pleasure]
Human beings are social animals. Connections with others are important. Social pleasure framework should also take place.
Requirements / System Overview –
Persona
To define users’ goal and motivation of this app, a persona has been created to go through to fulfill the goal.
User Requirements
In order to design the features for this conceptual app, I have brainstormed the features that the app should be included in. The user flows were then created to demonstrate the important functions on this stage.
Style guide –
Illustrations –
User Interface –
1. Create task
– Select a tree represent your mood
– Setup step checklist regarding the task
– Select the friend to be the monitor
2. Task checklist
– Display your tasks that are pending to be completed
– Display your friends tasks that required you to help monitoring
Here you can socialize with friends by:
– Sending out your task completed requests to friend
– Sending emoji as response to friends’ completed tasks
3. History
– Show the earned seed points with friends together when completed task;
– Or show deducted seed points with friends together when task cannot be completed on time
4. Harvest garden
– Try to plant tree with different number of seed to discover new tree species
5. Profile
Show your status and, manage your friend list
Reflection –
More user research is needed:
Since this is just a conceptual app designed supported by the study and application of different pleasure frameworks, just starting at the point of view from our classmates and I. In fact, when this idea is decided to come to life, a deeper user research should be conducted. For example, studying if there are some people who won’t suffer from procrastination. Why do they tend to finish tasks as soon as possible? Apart from assignment, any other things that they will procrastinate? So that the idea won’t just stay at theoretical level and may be brought more related to our life.
User test is needed:
To better go through the production process, a user test regarding the prototype with user feedback is required. Conducting user tests is important to validate the idea, in terms of the navigation and features. However, as this is one of the projects derived from the study of design psychology, this app is facing limitations of time and resources and staying in the conceptual stage.
