HoneyBuddy

Start Page, Login, Sign Up
Preference Setup, Weekly Challenge, Badge Popup
Personal Goals, Goal Details, AI-chatbot
Profile, Widget, Notification

1. Prototype Link link

2. Describe your project (max 150 words)

With students’ busy schedules, including classes, career goals, work, and extracurriculars, they often find it difficult to maintain a healthy lifestyle, achieve goals, and balance everything else on top of their busy schedules. Further, AI has become more common, which gives rise to people using it for unethical reasons, such as using AI art instead of human-created art, cheating, and more.

HoneyBuddy aims to reduce friction and effort to achieve a healthier lifestyle while also combating the unethical usage of AI. It aims to create a community that promotes the building of good habits with the usage of AI and location tracking to give personalized daily reminders and recommendations to accomplish the user’s desired goals. Students are able to create personalized milestones through an AI chatbot and accomplish weekly global challenges to earn badges.

3. Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include the link to your sources. (Max 500 words)

User Research

To understand our target audience better, we conducted surveys and one on one interviews to find out how college students value and reflect on their current lifestyle and how they would want to improve their habits and attitudes in the midst of increasing use of AI and technology. In the survey and interviews, we aimed for an even distribution of each year ranging from freshman to graduate students. Our surveys and interviews consisted of questions surrounding how satisfied college students are with their lifestyle at the moment.

Survey

Using a Google form, we surveyed 47 college students ranging from freshman to graduate students.

Given a scale 1-10, 1 being none and 10 being the most, 80.9% of students self-reported their stress levels being between 6-10. Furthermore, the majority of students surveyed described their diets as “unhealthy.” Despite an almost even split amongst students surveyed in regards to their satisfaction with their current lifestyle, an overwhelming 90% wanted to improve. A majority of these respondents expressed their desires to take more walks, exercise, and sleep more for a better quality of life. The most common reason that they do not take action to do so, however, was not enough motivation.

With the survey, 70% of students have their phones within arm’s reach around 80-100% of the time, but only 23.4% use apps to improve their lifestyles. From this data, a lifestyle app that takes a slightly different approach of relying on notifications or reminders would be effective, since most students have their phones close by and would be reminded throughout the day with notifications from the app.

Interviews

To support our quantitative research, we interviewed 11 college students in regards to how they are trying to improve their lifestyle and recorded our findings. Many value improvement of healthier habits and attitudes, but are held back by factors that stop them from improving their habits. The most prevalent improvements were eating healthy and exercising, while the biggest hindering factors were lack of time due to busy college schedules and lack of motivation. However, usually, having “not enough time” to do something often stems from the habit not being incorporated into a person’s routine. To combat this issue, the app must push for the person to build it into a habit, which gives rise to the idea of streaks and reminders in HoneyBuddy. Further, people wanted to know more information about why their habits are bad or good as well as a way to document their process. Like the survey, most people have their phones with them most of the time, which would make it easy to do frequent reminders for more forgetful people. Some desirable features of an app that were mentioned were informational notes that tell you the effect of good or bad habits, aesthetically pleasing or gamified apps, reminders, streaks and ways to document their routine like daily check-ins, and habit trackers.

4. Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words)

Why is HoneyBuddy an app and widget?

We chose to create an app and widget because we found that 70% of students have their arm’s reach 80-100% of the time. This makes mobile solutions the most effective way to remind students of their goals without any additional effort. A widget also acts as a visual reminder every time students go on their phone.

Purpose of weekly challenges

Our decision to include weekly challenges that are shared app-wide for all users is based on our findings that most student respondents in our survey and interview have similar lifestyle goals such as eating healthy and exercising more. These community based challenges create additional external motivation for students to improve their lifestyles and promote discussion amongst peers.

Why use chatbot to create new goals?

We also chose to use an AI-chatbot instead of the traditional form-style method to help students set up goals quickly and reduce friction. The flexibility of chatbot also allows students to create unique goals tailored to their needs and provide more personal recommendations.

Why personalized reminders?

As students are constantly under stress and overwhelmed, we incorporated tailored notifications throughout the day to remind students of their lifestyle goals. These notifications enable students to reach their goals effortlessly by eliminating the need for active planning or thought.

Purpose of badges and streaks

The incorporation of badges and streaks stemmed from our UX research. Our interviewees expressed their desire for a “gamification” of the app, as it would make it more fun for them to achieve, which would help them to achieve their goals. The inclusion of streaks was mainly due to not only our interviewees describing how streaks help them achieve goals, but also how, according to Silverman et. al, “a recent streak of goal-consistent behavior” causes the likelihood of the individual accomplishing the goal to increase because they tend to perceive a “higher level of commitment following a streak.”

Sources Used

Silverman et. al, “Hot streak! Inferences and predictions about goal adherence” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749597823000572