Statera

Inspiration

A problem that most college students have, which is difficulty finding a work-life balance, is our inspiration. As a college student, dividing time between relaxing and studying can be difficult due to the narrow and invisible distinction between life as a student and a human. Virtual learning also makes it hard to create boundaries between your leisure space and productive space, as most students go to class in their bedrooms.

Due to the lack of boundaries and work-life balance, students quickly find themselves playing with their phones when they first intended to message their team members about their project. On the flip side, they stress out about the to-do list for tomorrow on their phones when they're trying to unwind and relax in bed.

\We hope to help college students set a visible and conscious boundary between productivity and leisure, improve their mental health, and encourage them to create a distinction between their time of studying and time of relaxing.

What it does

Statera is a switch introducing two modes; study and relax. It encourages students to intentionally think, decide and commit to how they will spend their time for a given period. To do this, we offer a feature that allows students to be more aware of their activities by showing their app usage. In the long run, by introducing awareness to students, the routine will help the students' brain distinguish between their leisure time and productive time, decrease their stress, and improve their mental health.

How we built it

We first started Statera by creating a user persona of a college student named Taylor. Taylor has difficulties managing her stress caused by the fluctuating division of her day. Some days she will spend 3 hours working on homework and 5 hours relaxing, leaving her to sleep for 7 hours. Other days she will spend 8 hours working on assignments and 30 minutes relaxing, giving her time to sleep for 6 hours. Then, we brainstorm the features of Statera. We then worked on the user flow before moving to the drawing board to construct our low fidelity and high fidelity prototype on Adobe XD and Figma. We also used Cinema 4D to create the switch.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge for Statera is to prioritize the features of the application, as the team members have different concerns about what the application is responsible for. Due to the lack of time, we decided on a simple application concept. Another challenge that we face is the technical issues regarding the lack of familiarity with Adobe XD and 3D application as we are more familiar with Figma and flat designs. But, the learning curve is not too steep so we were able to get through it fairly easily.

Things we learn

We learned the importance of group collaboration in tackling issues from a diverse perspective. We are very thankful for collaboration tools like Miro and Slack that help us communicate our ideas efficiently despite working together remotely. We also learned new technical skills on applying After Effect, Cinema 4D, and Blender for our UI for the first time.

Next Steps

We hope to finalize Statera by polishing and introducing more features to the application as well as conducting user testing. Then, we can start creating a business plan to figure out a way to monetize our application.

Built With

• adobe-xd
• after-effects
• blender
• cinema-4d
• figma
• miro