Sift: A Student's Centralized Dashboard
Designing a centralized workspace to reduce context switching for students. 💻
Client:
Original Product - COGS 120
Category:
Product Design, UX Research, Interaction Design
My Role:
Team of 5 · Product Designer · Research → Prototype
Most modern work takes place across a growing ecosystem of digital tools where diverse users rely on specialized cloud services, apps and add-ons.
With the expansion of this fast-paced ecosystem, these resources become scattered across devices and keeping track of project progress becomes increasingly difficult. Tools such as Notion, Slack and Trello are examples of systems that attempt to tackle the issue by combining some features, but at the end they introduce a new learning curve and yet another application to the user’s already overwhelming collection.
Each of these applications work fine on their own.
The problem is that they don’t connect well together and users lack a unified project view. Students and professionals have to mentally track everything themselves: remembering where files are stored and which versions are still relevant or which task belongs to which stage of the project.
Our Research
What is the issue with today's products?
1) The Limitations of Existing Applications
Slack acts like a messaging app while integrating a number of third-party add-ons to facilitate collaboration. However, the advantage of multiple channels also becomes the source of confusion and information loss, making it difficult to track progress.
2) Information Overload
When information and tasks are distributed across multiple systems, users are forced to reconstruct context, which disrupts focus and workflow continuity. Studies in cognitive ergonomics indicate that excessive information demands negatively affect concentration and well-being.
3) Fragmentation
According to research, producing and accessing electronic health records is a burden for clinicians because the information is obtained and kept in different interfaces. They are forced to context-switch when looking at different information about a single patient and more prone to make errors.
The Design Process
We proposed "a unified workflow dashboard that gives students and creative teams one clear place to see their entire project."
Our design would act as a connecting layer that organizes information from these tools into one structured interface. Key features would include:
1) Visual Project Timeline
Divided into clear stages — research, ideation, design, and final delivery.
2) File Linking and Version Awareness
Users link files from external platforms. The system shows up-to-date changes and updates in one place
3) Centralized Task and Team Overview
Users are designated tasks as well as can see completed tasks.
The Good, The Bad, and Ugly
The Solution
Stage Viewing + Adding New Projects
Each project contains its own color-coded progress bar, the bar becoming increasingly red to green nearing 100% completion. Contains feature to add a project deadline, applicable to the in-system calendar.
Team Updates in Real Time
Sift allows users to assign project tasks to themselves or other teammates. Need help? Stuck on a task? You can update your status for other users to see, and leave a comment for them.
Centralized Groupwork
Sift contains a "Messages" tab, allowing groupmates to communicate within Sift and comment on projects in real-time. No need to switch between Discord, Slack, iMessage, etc.
The Results
3 rounds of user testing.
40+ hours of Figma iterations.
88% satisfaction rate among participants using Sift.
Reflection
What I learned from this project:
Design is extensive, especially since this was the first project I've conducted that required lots of academic articles/research to proceed with implementation. With my team we gathered 20+ scholarly papers related to cognitive overload/context switching, gathering loads of statistics to prove its issue in clinical and workplace settings.
What I'd change moving forward:
In the future, I'd like to have the prototype used more by our target demographic: students, typically in college, or even adults. I'd like to see how they interact with the interface and believe is useful in their day-to-day life. Was the interface too minimal? Could the typography be different to fit more modern designs? I'm so curious.
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