Weather Or Not
During the academic year, the weather conditions in Ontario can vary immensely depending on the season. For students, these changing weather conditions can have implications on their behaviour and well-being as they navigate the school year.
The Weather or Not project focuses on user research exploring the problem space of weather’s impact on student behaviour and well-being during the academic year.
Tools Used
Google Forms
Power Point
Mural
Team
Dominic Abogado
Rick Cheng
Gabrielle David
Nicole Ge
Category
UX research course project
Timeline
Sep - Dec 2021
(4 months)
Objective
The goal of the project was to plan and conduct a series of formative and summative research with various methodologies (including interviews and diary studies) to examine the relationship between weather conditions and students’ behaviour and well-being.
Additionally, the team was to operationalize the collected user insights and scenarios to generate data-driven and user-first design recommendations for a potential technological solution.
Process
From user insights to design recommendations.
The project focused on user experience research and analysis. In particular, our research team began by identifying domains, applications and, user groups that could benefit from design interventions through secondary research. From there, the team formulated meaningful research questions that could inform product design and deployed interview study and diary study methodologies to gather user insights. These findings were then analyzed and operationalized to develop user focused design recommendations and strategies for a digital solution.
Problem Space
Identify domains, applications, and users that could benefit from design interventions.
This study is motivated to understand students’ weather-dependent behaviours and how this plays a role towards their well-being. Understanding this relationship may provide insights on how to limit the influences of weather on well-being to help reduce the number of stressors in students’ lives during the academic term.
For these reasons, this project aims to address the problem space of student productivity in terms of how different weather conditions impact academics, and engagement in extracurricular and social activities.
Research Questions
To find a solution to this problem, our research is directed by the following research questions:
How does the weather influence student behaviour throughout all aspects of post-secondary students’ lifestyles during the school year?
Does inclement weather impact the well-being of students during the school year?
Interview Study
Understanding the problem and the user.
Our team conducted 20 semi-structured interviews in 2 phases regarding the influence of weather on student behaviour. In the beginning, the first 10 interviews focused on weather and food related behaviours. However, based on the results, we realized that this focus made our problem space too narrow and failed to present a user ability that could be enhanced in terms of design.
Because of this roadblock with our second set, the team pivoted to examine the research problem of students having difficulties sustaining their levels of productivity during varying weather conditions in Ontario. We did this for two reasons; to expand our problem space and to identify a user ability to enhance.
Process
Our interview questions considered how the weather affects students’ mood and engagement with certain activities, what the participants’ regular study habits are and how these habits might change according to the weather, and the impacts of varying weather conditions towards their social lives and the activities they engage in outside of academics such as extracurriculars, fitness, and hobbies. Results were thematically analyzed where themes were coded, and quotes were grouped together to identify units of analysis, patterns, and outliers.
Findings
Impact on Mood
Weather played a significant role in participants’ mood, however, this change in mood was dependent on personal preferences.
“Cloudless sunny days puts me in a better mood, I feel more energetic…”
Impact on Productivity and Motivation
Weather impacts on productivity made respondents look for a change of scenery or pace.
“If the weather makes me feel tired and I have to get work done, I try to take a break, make some food, take a nap, or go to a different library.”
Impact on Study and Work Performance
Weather impacts on mood yields effects on study and work habits.
“When it’s nice outside I get distracted and would like to enjoy the sun... So, it reduces my productivity.”
Diary Study
Understanding long-term user behaviour and experiences.
To further examine the domain of varying weather conditions and its impact on student lifestyle, the team conducted a diary study with 10 participants to investigate what motivates students’ decisions as it related to weather.
We chose the diary study method because we wanted to identify how weather impacts the lifestyle of post-secondary students in Ontario by gathering insights and rich personal data as it relates to how the participants think and feel about certain weather conditions from their day-to-day activities over a period of time. Specifically, as a longitudinal research method, the diary study created an opportunity to collect quantitative and qualitative data as the participants experienced and responded to various weather, activities, and levels of productivity throughout the period of the study.
Process
The process of the diary study involved asking the participants to complete a Google Form at the end of the day over a week. The research team sent a reminder prompt to each participant through direct messages in the evening during these seven days (at approximately 9:00pm EST).
We chose to ask the participants to complete the form in the evening because we wanted to gather the behaviour and feelings about weather across the entire day including any changes throughout the day. The specific areas we focused on gather data from included:
How weather impacts students’ mood and school-related productivity
How weather impacts students’ ability to engage in extracurricular and social activities
If engaging in these activities influences their productivity or has any impact on school related stress.
With the data, we conducted both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis by using central tendency measures for cluster analysis of the Likert scale questions, coding keywords from the open-ended questions to find consistent themes, and affinity diagram analysis to further reveal patterns between participants answers.
Findings
Established a relationship between weather and mood’s impact on students’ school-related productivity.
Weather did not create much of a hinderance to students’ ability to engage in extracurricular and social activities.
Importance of engaging in activities to relieve school-related stress.
Design Guidelines
Operationalizing user insights to provide a positive user experience.
Based in our research, we recommend that a digital design solution should:
Allow students to understand how the changing weather conditions affect their productivity.
Enable students to get accurate weather-related information in real time.
Provide students a way to manage their time.
Help students keep track of what they accomplished throughout the day.
Help students be aware and establish connections between stress relief activities and their level of productivity.
Key Takeaways
Personal lessons.
Applied more nuanced research methods.
Through this project, I gained experience with more nuanced research methods. Specifically, I was able to practice diary studies for the first time, and use this method to collect data about users’ behaviors, activities, and experiences over a period of time.
Additionally, with this project, I was able to experience a comprehensive and extensive research process as I focused on conducting ethical research and recognizing undue influence, designed and conducted the research studies, and practiced techniques for quantitative and qualitative data analysis.
Pivoting research questions.
While working on this project, the research team hit a roadblock in which we realized that this focus of our original problem space was too narrow and failed to present a user ability that could be enhanced in terms of design. We struggled with this, however as a team we managed to overcome the issue by taking a step back and pivoting our research questions.
Hence, this experience has taught me about project hurdles and ways of overcoming them including the importance of exploring alternative routes, asking for direction, and focusing on the end goal.
If I had more time.
Further research depth.
With more time, I would have loved to conduct an additional longitudinal study to further examine students in more weather conditions.
Additionally, I would have wished to expand the research demographics to cover students who live in climate regions different to that of Ontario.