Student life encompasses a diverse range of experiences, from academic pursuits to social interactions, and personal development. By gaining insights into these aspects of student life, designers can create simple digital products/experiences that promote holistic wellbeing, foster academic success, and enhance the overall student experience.

What is a "Case Crack"?

“A case crack is all about teamwork and problem solving - a collaborative process where together, team members brainstorm, gather insights, and work on innovative solutions to find the best way forward”

This case crack, run by SUEDE in the University of Sydney and Deloitte Digital, required participating teams to research, organise insights, synthesise, ideate and prototype a potential solution for the presented design challenge within a day and present to a panelist of judges.

Youth Insight, in 2023, found stress to be a prominent and ongoing issue for university students. 7 out of 10 participants in their study reported feeling stressed at least once per week.

To investigate the underlying reasons for academic stress among university students and explore the effectiveness of various coping strategies used to mitigate these stressors.

Studying and stress is a multifaceted issue among students, and therefore each student's experience is individual and different.

As such, conducting interviews was the only suitable research method within our given time frame which allowed us to gather valuable insights even with a small pool of students on how students cope with stress and narrow down our user pain points.

This is a short excerpt from our interview transcript:

To organise our research findings, we created an affinity diagram to visualise and easily interpret our data, and identify key information and ideas.

What did we find?

So, what do students struggle with?

University students often experience a lack of motivation related to their academic performance, which can contribute to stress, anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy.

“How can we help students cultivate a supportive and collaborative community that fosters connections and provides an avenue for escapism as a means of collective stress relief.”

Putting our minds together

To ideate a final solution, we gathered our ideas by brain writing - just writing down everything that comes to mind.

From here, we go and pull good aspects from each potential solution and build an app that has the best features.
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After narrowing down our ideas to three main options, we put them into a decision matrix.
By utilising Pugh’s decision matrix, we can effectively compare and evaluate these options against predetermined criteria.

Despite not winning the competition, we received great compliments on our prototype's design and creativity. It was upon receiving feedback, we realised our idea was impractical to develop into a real-world project and is what ultimately prevented us from winning.

Overall, this project provided me with valuable knowledge and experience in working collaboratively and under high-pressure environments, which would be applicable in other professional work settings.