UNILEVER

Dove Men+ Care

Discipline
UX Research, UX Design, Product Design

Timeline
4 months

Team
Uyen Phan, Anya Kishida, Jenny Weng, Joanna Ye

Unilever is one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, known for its great brands and belief that doing business the right way drives superior performance. As part of their efforts to create more sustainable projects, Unilever tasked us with creating sustainable and desirable packaging for Dove products.

Context and Problem Space Overview

How might we make the process of forming study groups more effective?

Jump to Solution!

Research

Current Process
Uncover the current methods and tools that
college students use to form study groups

Existing Challenges
Identify the challenges college
students face in the process

Ideal Process
Determine what the ideal process of
finding study groups would look like

After surveying 40 UC Berkeley students and conducting 1-on-1 interviews with 8 students, key insights began to emerge:

Synthesis

Ideation

Familiarity & Sociability
Study groups are more often than not formed for both academic and social purposes, with students preferring to work with those they have common ground with

Perception & Personality
Students often feel anxious and intimidated to be perceived as less smart, under-preforming, or not contributing

Structure
Study group dynamics are often unpredictable and unfair, discouraging students from forming groups

With a focus on our two specified user groups, we delved into the emotional aspects of interacting with the visual interface.

Option 1 is an app wherein students would input their preferences for study groups and then be shown people in their classes with similar preferences.

Students will be able to make their own groups, or be added to a completely randomized group with people with similar preferences. Integrated chat features and schedulers make it easy to work either digitally or in-person after the groups after the groups are made.

Option 2 on the right is a web-based platform that would help students share documents and coordinate their availability. This option is more geared towards students who prefer to do the majority of their work online, or those who are not too interested in meeting up in person with their study group.

To break down the problem scope and begin solving the problem, I began by conducting research with the goals of uncovering:

Final Solution and Designs

A mobile application that allows users to create profiles, input their study preferences, share documents and schedules, and create effective study groups!

Custom Preferences

One of the largest pain points when creating effective study groups was the varying needs of different types of learners. Thus, as students have different learning styles and preferences, I developed a solution that enables you to create custom profiles and search for study partners based on a wide set of parameters. These include academic year, major, preferred study times, and other personality preferences. All preferences and shared classes are also displayed on users’ individual profiles to be viewed at a quick glance.

Users can also search for a specific individual, allowing you add friends and chat in-app for a comprehensive studying experience.

Collaborate and Share Files

To reduce social friction, BearBuddies encourages the use of collaborative study tools. Users can send messages in-app and link other applications including Google Drive to share flashcards, notes, and other essential documents quickly and efficiently.

Coordinate Schedules

Another one of the largest pain points was conflicting schedules and difficulties during coordination. Thus, BearBuddies features an in-build scheduling tool to help effectively identify open study session times for users. Users can also share their calendars with added friends and groups.