Baby Steps to Adulthood
Lauren Capistran, Chandler Maloney, Anne Thompson and Emma Williams
It’s hard to be in college. There are so many things to keep track of and learn: attending classes, making friends, falling in love, finding a job, going for a run, eating vegetables and eventually developing into a responsible human being. We’re thrown into the world of adulthood when we turn 18, and for many students, it’s a lot to juggle. Aspects of our lives begin to fail. What if there was a way to organize everything that we needed to know to be productive adults? How could UT students be encouraged to become more educated about adult responsibilities and healthy habits? This is the question we hope to answer with our innovation.
After floating our idea to our peers, we received lots of useful feedback that will inform our design moving forward. The biggest takeaway for our group is to taper our broad design question. We’ll be able to better prepare students to enter adulthood with premeditated healthy habits. We anticipate running into challenges with getting students to “buy in” to our design solution. To combat this, we’ve brainstormed potential solutions that could manifest in incorporating our app into UT’s First Year Interest Groups, student interest groups, and more on-campus resources that the university currently offers. By incorporating this feedback into our design, we’ll be able to provide the most effective solution possible for students.
While framing our design challenge, we also constructed a list of possible solutions that we will either develop or completely change as we progress throughout the product design process. We hope that the interviews we conduct with stakeholders including longhorn students, faculty and experts in fields we’ll help students learn about. Creating space that UT students could utilize to keep track of their personalized goals was one of the possible solutions that we listed. Our group also proposed sharing goal tracking among friends to foster a greater sense of community. Lastly, we envisioned providing incentives to encourage students to remain on track to fulfill their goal. These ideas mentioned were only a few of the several that we suggested could be incorporated into our final design product to encourage healthy habits among the longhorn community.
The outcome of our project is to create an independent and productive individual by the time they graduate college. Ultimately, we want to create well-rounded individuals who know how to handle their finances and personal goals. To accomplish being a well-rounded individual, our prototype is useful for developing healthy habits and consistency. We aim to provide resources for students similar to ones that The University of Texas offers. The outcome of providing resources is to give a sense of direction to students when they need expertise in an area of personal or educational growth. We are aware of how incoming freshmen feel lost in their first year in college, and we hope to help them with developing healthy habits and having knowledge about the simple tasks everyone should know.
This image is a screenshot of a social media influencer that uses habit tracking to help her reach her personalized goals. Some habits that she is pushing herself to develop include achieving eight hours of sleep, eating home-cooked dinners, and walking her dog. Over time she hopes that these small tasks requiring minimal effort will help her become a more productive adult. Our group is taking into consideration how habit tracking may or may not be useful in our final design product to help UT students similarly follow responsible routines.