When working in a group setting, many factors can impact the overall working experience. Some factors, such as differing goals and poor communication, can hinder the effectiveness of the overall teamwork. While there exist technologies like Notion, Discord, and Slack, that can help minimize some issues, they may also introduce new ones. For instance, the channels in a Discord server can help with organization, but having too many channels may become confusing.
Our main focus is on enhancing the productivity of team collaboration and exploring features of commonly used technologies during group projects. Our target audience is college students (aged 18-22) who are working in a group setting for school.
We chose to conduct user research using semi-structured interviews. Each team member interviewed two people, and these interviews were done both online and in person. We started by asking interviewees about their worst and best group project experiences then followed up with questions that focused on communication, work distribution, general difficulties, and what they think could have improved their experiences.
Questions about group communication aimed to reveal what communication and collaboration tools they used (ex. Discord, texting, GSuite) and how these tools improved productivity or lacked the features to be effective.
We asked about work distribution to find out how tasks were divided (if members chose their own tasks or were assigned parts), how members held each other accountable to action items and deadlines, and if they had trouble with completing anything within their timeframes.
Furthermore, we wanted to learn more about problems our interviewees faced with group dynamics, such as if members were friends, knew each other beforehand, or were strangers, and how those relationships helped or hurt the group in achieving their goals.
We thought that semi-structured interviews would allow interviewees to tell us about their unfiltered group project experiences and help us gain insight into their opinions, attitudes, and perceptions of group work. Extremely specific details about the projects themselves weren’t needed; rather, we thought that if there were things people really liked or really disliked about their experiences, those factors would stand out and be most important to our research.
The eight participants that we interviewed were college students (aged 18-22) who have previously worked in a group environment for school. Some of these interviews were conducted online, via Zoom, and some in person.
Some common challenges our participants brought up included delegating and tracking tasks, making sure each group member did their part, and a lack of communication from some group members. Common tools used during group projects were Discord, Notion, and Zoom.
In all group project experiences, the main activity was to complete the project in a satisfactory manner. Other sub-activities included establishing responsibilities, organizing work, and communicating.
There were two main environments that our interviewees collaborate in: digital and physical. Most of the time, these students collaborated in the digital environment to exchange information and often only worked in the physical environment at times when it was necessary (i.e. for a physical project). Many worked in projects that only involved digital collaboration.
We observed that in group projects, students interact with each other through online communication, in-person meetings, and working on the projects synchronously (either in the same physical or digital space). Multiple of our interviewee’s worst group project experiences involved group members who refused to participate in these interactions. We also observed that sometimes, these interactions are reduced by group members being unfamiliar with each other (random groups), while these interactions are more productive with group members who know each other at least somewhat.
The different tools and apps these students used to maintain communication among group members, establish deadlines, and organize work within their group projects. This often included texting or Discord for general communication, Google Drive for organizing work, and Canvas for meeting deadlines.
Our semi-structured interviews gained insight into how college students (aged 18-22) have experienced group work in their classes, the issues that prevent them from successful group work, and the actions they take to address the challenges that arise during group work.
Overall, we noticed that many external factors could heavily affect the experience and outcome of a group project, such as how well structured the project and course themselves were. This also included how well students knew their other group members, which affected how comfortable they felt communicating with and holding them to deadlines. Moving forward, we want to think of solutions to streamline group work, such as through compiling deadlines with reminders, assigning tasks, and organizing files and resources. At the same time, we want our solution to mitigate the effects of less controllable factors, such as the less comfortable collaboration and communication that can occur in randomly assigned groups. We will likely want to research and test whether increasing productivity within a group can overcome these possible issues with collaboration or communication.