Team Alpaca: Cristobal, Ecy, Jin-Hee, Nolawi

Our team is studying the social behaviors of students in their final year at Stanford. Our holistic goal was to enable students to feel more fulfilled by their social life in their finite remaining time at Stanford.

Part 1: Synthesis

Baseline Study

We are studying the social habits of Stanford students in their final year, focusing on seniors and coterminal students. 

This is important because students in their last year face some of their final opportunities to meet up with friends and socialize in the Stanford environment before going to the “Great Beyond” after Stanford. 

A sense of social fulfillment senior year— aided by desired social habits—can contribute to social wellbeing, and wellbeing, happiness, wellness, is important to us all! 

Thus, for our baseline, we wanted to see what current social habits looked like in final years. We filtered out our screener to look for seniors and coterms in their final year who were looking to be more social.

Over the period of 5 days, participants reported on their social habits. They’d receive 3 texts a day, and would report on the social things they did during that period— when they reached out to someone or did a social activity, for instance— and how they felt. From this, we had a better idea of what current social habits looked like as well as commonalities, pain points, friction, and potential personas with social coordination. 

Data Categorization

After coming into class with sticky notes from all of our data (pre-study interview, study, post-study interview), we grouped all of the sticky notes into categories and looked for patterns and insights along the way. Here is a table including the major categories we created, plus their insights:

How you feel after the social time	Social time helps to resolve stress, but interactions can also be stressful. Meaningful conversations can be healing, especially when catching up with a new friend Social time can be rejuvenating, especially when there is an aspect of newness in the dynamic somehow i.e. hung out with a new group or combination of people.
Last year at Stanford	People wanted more social interactions but students in their last years have many different things competing for their attention. Examples of this are: Work Relationships Academics Existential concerns People feel the clock ticking, thus a desire to maximize the finite time they have left. More emphasis is placed on deeper connections than making more superficial ones. Graduating places a great deal of stress on individuals as they face the “unknown”.
Life after Stanford	The idea of a new life after Stanford is exciting  Peoples’ friends will be distributed after graduation; it is scary to think that all of your friends won’t be in one place. People’s fear of the socially unknown prompts them to lean into the socially known— their friends and “familiars” People are concerned with a loss of connections after graduation. They are afraid of losing the community they have built at Stanford. “I don’t want to move to a city where I do not know anyone”.
Music	Having the connection of music is joyous, and provides an additional layer of communication. It feels connecting to share a passion Music communities on campus provide consistent ways to see each other i.e. weekly Monday CoHo jazz nights i.e. weekly rehearsals being “serious, but always fun” with moments like “little jokes between songs”
Big events (birthdays)	Participation in Stanford community events increases as graduating students feel that this is their last chance. Attending events with friends is a low effort, low friction way to get high social gains  This applies to the attendees; the planners would have higher effort Feels like more of a “given” that you would definitely attend, since it’s a “more important event” than a catch-up with a friend
Flaking / rescheduling	Flake culture feels rampant and a barrier to actually meet up despite intents to do so; flake culture is often not a result of intent but barriers like classes and such  Rescheduling is very difficult! Because people at Stanford are so busy Texting back and forth is tedious → less motivated to make plans
Routine	Routines can be a double edge sword. Both social interactions and social isolation can be achieved depending on one’s routine. Meaningful social interactions could be increased through some design for behavior change. Feels easier (lower activation energy) to set up something routine so you don’t have to go through the chaos of scheduling Familiarity can breed comfort in social interactions The time of day impacted the quality of social experience / conversation
From freshman year → senior year	Catching up with older communities is satisfying Friends from your first year on campus defines your experience of a social campus and what you look for Not as strong of a desire to make new friends once you’re in your senior year, “happy with where I am”
Unplanned social interactions	Spontaneously bumping into people that you’ve met throughout the years often leads to planning something with them later on  People crave catching up with people they perceive to have less time with
Planned / planning interactions	Preplanned interactions are useful for graduating students as they have many competing interests and having a plan works better for them. Reaching out can have high activation energy but high reward It is convenient to do planning on the weekends, for events that happen for the following week
Class / academics	People view “working together” as social time That way, time is still not being “taken away” from other categories of the day Academics become more of a means to an end as graduation approaches.
Introvertedness	People feel that alone time is important and not something to neglect People want a balance between social time and alone time Introvertedness can make it difficult to be the one reaching out and making plans Introvertedness does not mean that the quality of social experiences has decreased even if quantity might have
Physical spaces (including dorms)	People who live in dorms have more unplanned interactions
Relationships	Spending time with your romantic partner is a given, making time for platonic friends is variable. For older platonic relationships: catching up with people you’ve interacted with from the beginning of your Stanford experience provides a sense of closure in the final year
Social media / online	Social media is ironically a negative factor in sustaining social relationships People don’t view time on social media as social time, but rather online time.
Meals / mealtimes	Mealtimes are an opportune time to plan things and usually end up in social spaces Meals feel like an ideal time to catch up Scheduling meals feels like a hassle, but once done is very satisfying  People “have to eat anyway,” so it doesn’t feel like time is being “taken away from the day” if you overlap social time with meal time
Exercise	Exercise was a convenient way to spend time with friends eager to spend time w/ each other. Healthy and/or essential opportunities feel like a chance for “dual reward”— the reward of the activity and the reward of the social time

Grounded Theories + Insights

Here is a link to our full document with all grounded theories and synthesis. The theories are also below, with our key theories bolded and marked with an asterisk (*). Key theories were determined based on the ideation they sparked and the quantity of data we had related to that insight.

Theory 1: Graduating students are grappling with the idea of losing the structure from their college lives and then having to integrate into society. 

• They are particularly concerned with the following:
  • Working
  • Housing 
  • Living Alone (w/ SO)
  • Having to make friends
• The things they are losing from college life are the following:
  • Housing
  • Proximity to Friends/SO
  • A routine of going to classes
  • Living near to everything you need (No commute for most)
• Subtheory: Graduating college can seem like a point of no return where after you graduate you are thrown into the pit that is the real world with no return; there is no exit path.

Theory 2: Spontaneously bumping into old Stanford friends evokes feelings of urgency and nostalgia. These feed off each other and lead to planned interactions immediately following the first interaction. *

• Subtheory: Bumping into people represents an opportunity to quickly schedule a meet up that otherwise would not have occurred. 
  • Bumping serves as a reminder to meet with someone you enjoy before you graduate. 
  • This desire often isn’t realized, however, as flake culture and scheduling difficulties cause friction. 
  • People might be in a rush and don’t have time to schedule something after such a spontaneous interaction.
• Subtheory: Senior/final year people feel the greatest sense of fulfillment and joy after meeting with familiar friends.
  • R.W. said  it’s “nice to be inspired and uplifted by friends & uplift others” 
  • Intrinsic motivation for social interaction is strongest senior year, but friction from previous years stays the same.

Theory 3: The scheduling and rescheduling of social plans feels tedious and difficult, so they are active barriers to students spending planned social time with one another. *

• Subtheory: To students who are making social plans, the negative side of tediousness or difficulty of the scheduling process outweighs the positive side of the possible social time with friends.
• Subtheory: It is very uncommon for a Stanford student to have every single one of their friends live in the same space. Thus, students need to text one another and go back-and-forth to make plans. The act of texting itself is something that students view as tedious. This tediousness is in direct conflict with their motivation to see friends, thus dampening the motivation.
  • N.S. ended up not seeing a friend because they had to reschedule coffee, but hadn’t found another time that works for them both when texting.

Theory 4: As students go through their last year on campus, their desire to maximize the time they have left leads them to prioritize spending time with their older friends. This means they view spending time with deeper connections more valuable than newer friendships, which might still be more surface-level.

• Subtheory: Students’ most valuable experiences involve people that they see as their deepest connections. 
  • F.V. mentioned his most salient experience of making the most of his remaining time was a simple hangout with friends to celebrate the end of fall quarter that, for him, “meant that we’ve grown as, as a friend group and we’ve grown as, as, as people together.”

Theory 5: Mealtimes are an opportune window for scheduling social time because of the culturally social nature of meals, the physical spaces of dining on the Stanford campus, and the fact that you always map out time to eat during the day anyway.

• Subtheory: Students prefer not to allocate additional time for social time, and would rather find an overlap during something they do anyway during the day. Although these interactions are easier to schedule, they can at times have limited meaningfulness. Deliberately scheduled events are often more meaningful and dynamic.
• Subtheory: Communion has been a critical part of building social credit within a group. However, there has been a loss in effort for dorms to sit together. The banners above tables are for vanity at this point. Spaces where there is a culture of communion largely disappeared during the pandemic and are barely starting to return. Efforts to revitalize these spaces have seen mixed results.

Next, we synthesized these theories and got the following:

• From Theories 1 and 2, emotions that motivate socialization of final years include fear of graduating, nostalgia, and a sense of urgency. These emotions are the strongest and most salient senior year.
• From Theories 3 and 4, people want to socialize with deep connections, but face friction in doing so. It may be possible to capitalize off of the depth of the connections.
• From Theories 4 and 5, mealtimes represent an opportunity to catch up with deep friends. In this lies an opportunity not just to catch up, but also get to know close friends at a deeper level. 

Finally, we considered what key questions emerged and the potential design questions.

• How can we encourage students for whom it is their last year to make the most of their remaining moments?
  • Design question: What metrics are we going to apply when deciding what makes social interactions meaningful?
• How can we encourage people to have more interactions with those that they believe are their deepest connections?
  • Design question: How can we design an interface that reduces the friction that people feel when trying to schedule interactions?

System Models

In this 2×2 model, we looked to map common types of social events / experiences from the framework of effort versus impact, as we knew from experience and as we saw from our baseline study people. Our experience showed that the events that had high impact tended to be those that were most obviously social in nature, and those tended to not be high effort, such as going to the gym and talking on the phone. On the other end, low impact events included low-effort things like  texting and social media, but often higher-effort things like student orgs, planned meals with not that well-known people, and having people flake on you.

Our second model looks to highlight connections between different aspects of the social experience for people for whom it’s their last months at Stanford. The modeling of connections in this context shows us that urgency seems to be a massive driver of people’s social experience, both in terms of causing stress and increasing the amount you reach out to others to make plans. The connection circle was very helpful to find the relationships between all of the factors that go into a Stanford senior’s social life.

Secondary Research

For our comparative research we decided to plot the “effort” it takes to make social interactions with one of these products against the “impact” the product has on a user’s social interactions. 

iMessage and Instagram are both low in effort but iMessage has a greater impact as you are speaking directly to individuals as opposed to portraying your ideal self on Instagram. Of course this comes with the prerequisite of having people to engage with on iMessage in a meaningful way.

When2meet and Doodle Poll are direct competitors so they are in similar spots to in the diagram. They are both used for scheduling events whose impact varies based on what is being planned.

BFF requires a fair amount of effort from the user but if the user is able to actualize and make friends then the impact is substantial. YouCanBookMe is not dissimilar from BFF with the exception that it takes a bit less effort as it is in a professional environment that does not demand the same social expectations as BFF. 

Google Calendar is a fairly high effort endeavor and using it to schedule social interactions is impactful but it is not the whole value proposition of Google Calendar. 

In our secondary research we found that a way to reduce friction for users’ ability to engage in social interactions is to either create a space or to make scheduling easier. Having people convene at a location is a prerequisite for a social outing. When2meet, Doodle Poll, and Google Calendar are all tools used to accomplish this. We accessed these tools to be high effort for various reasons. People have schedule conflicts, “committed” people end up flaking, and there are inertial forces that have to be overcome when making something happen. There is room in the market for scheduling made easy. All other explored competitors are in the business of making a space for groups. Many of these platforms cover a specific demographic. Connecting our target users of graduating Stanford students with heightened interests in interacting with others would be the differentiator for our product.

Proto-Personas + Journey Maps

Our 3 representative personas and their respective journey maps are shown here:

Representative Persona #1: Scheduling Conflict 

Jane Arrillaga is modeled after the senior year student who already has a job lined up, but wants to make the most out of the Stanford experience she has left. 

How? Through attending fun events with friends, of course! A few people we interviewed were going out into industry and wanted to do meaningful, fun activities they enjoyed with friends. They felt a sense of urgency. 

This journey map represents the process for Jane to go from seeing an event she wants to attend to potentially enjoying it with friends. 

There is a lot that can go wrong with this process through— issues with scheduling, flake culture, heavy coordination. 

We saw an opportunity to simplify this process through our intervention, creating an AI scheduler that can lessen this burden. 

Representative Persona #2: Fulfillment / Maximizing Remaining Time

This persona emerged from the emotions we saw motivating social decisions in final years. This included stress about the future and fears about making the most of the present moment. 

SL is scared his time with friends is fleeting and nervous about his uncertain future and the changes to come. From this stems a desire to somehow, anyhow maximize how he spends his time with friends. 

This involves saying yes to more things and seeking events out more than he would have otherwise. 

In S.L.’s journey map, we can see how he finds social activities enriching, and how he is more driven to engage in social activities because of the horizon of graduation – the horizon of change. Considering our intervention study, we brainstormed how we can allow S.L. to maximize their time remaining. 

Representative Persona #3: Changing it Up

Our final representative persona is S.D., who we nicknamed “Beyond Food” because of the pattern of going (or wanting to go) beyond mealtimes as her only planned social time. On the Stanford campus, an overwhelming majority of students use mealtimes as the only time to catch up with friends, and making plans is often synonymous with “getting a meal.” However, we’ve also found from our research that folks want to do something “special” and do more with their friends. So, we felt that S.D. stood at a unique and representative position that we wanted to address in our study.

Perhaps the most double-edged moment in S.D.’s journey map was the Wednesday lunch, since she enjoyed her time with her friend, but also felt guilty that they had not followed through yet on their plans to do karaoke. This made us think about how we could intervene and get S.D. past the barriers that were preventing her from following through.

As a group, we came up with several other proto-personas, but ultimately decided on these three for striking the breadth and representativeness of our user pool.

Part 2: Intervention

Ideation

We began our ideation process by free listing ideas on how we could remove friction from the social lives of our participants and make spaces for them to be social. After we generated these ideas apart we came together. Our first idea of introducing some autonomous artificially intelligent agent was actually shared among three of our members in some form. We had to narrow the field on many different ideas but eventually settled on two more. Our other two ideas were more left field. The second idea was a gamified text scheduler that would reward players for quick replies. Our third idea was to make participants deposit money before a preplanned social event and if someone did not show up their deposit would be split amongst those who did. To recap our ideas were:

1. AI social planner
2. Gamified text scheduler
3. Scheduling Plans with Deposits

To select our final idea we weighed the pros and cons of each study. Our brainstormed table is shown below:

Idea	Pros	Cons
AI Scheduler Buddy	Reduces scheduling headache The spontaneity of it can make social life feel refreshing, like a surprise platonic date	Users may not trust an AI agent to be involved in their social life How easily could this accommodate a change in schedule? For actual product, would involve heavy tech stack
Gamified Text Scheduler	Encouraging people to make progress in some way Makes scheduling fun instead of a chore.	Questions about intentions / ethics Is it right for someone to hang out solely for points?
Dark Horse: Flake Fixer	Rewards consistency Discourages Flaking Raises the stakes of social interactions.	Ethical implications of tackling a “natural” behavior that sometimes occurs out of self-preservation? Monetary constraints of people who may not be able to commit

For the AI social planner, the most substantial benefit would be the reduction of friction generated by making social plans. Our target users, graduating Stanford students, have packed schedules that make it challenging for them to make plans. Schedule conflicts, long text chains, and delayed responses are not uncommon among our population and this idea’s value proposition is changing that. Introducing an outside agent to this system gives users the chance to get pre-scheduled spontaneous social events that fit their day. 

The core issue with this idea would be gathering the schedule for users and figuring the availability. Schedules are also dynamic especially for these busy students. When coordinating plans between different users this issue becomes more prevalent. They should also be allowed to reject ideas which creates a more complex logic tree.

Considering the gamified text scheduler, we found that the benefits were largely the same from our first idea but with the added benefit of creating a fun gaming experience for users when formalizing plans. 

The problem with this idea that we came across when presenting our storyboards was that this solution was not directly related to the problem. By adding a game to an already challenging task we might be addressing how boring scheduling can be but we are making it more time consuming, by introducing friction, to others.

The last idea on the deposit secured events attempts to fix the flake culture that plagues Stanford. To correct this behavior this solution raises the stakes for social interaction that would deter people from creating plans without intending to follow through and reward those who consistently attend events they plan.

The trouble with this idea is the ethical dilemma that is created when introducing a monetary incentive. It punishes individuals who have to perform an action out of “self-preservation”. It also creates monetary constraints for some students.

By the end of ideation we determined that the AI Scheduler Buddy was the standout idea. The other solution had issues integral to how they operated but the AI Scheduler Buddy was only held back by problems that are not intrinsic but could be solved by designing a careful study. The friction it removed from our users was determined to be more substantial than what the other two ideas would accomplish.

Intervention Study: What?

In creating our intervention study, we first considered which behaviors we wanted to encourage, and brainstormed the following:

• Healthy scheduling habits in order to make social plans *
  • Less friction in meeting friends
  • Non-tedious scheduling process
• Meeting old friends before you graduate

• Getting out of your room and seeing people who matter to you *

We found ourselves gravitating toward the ideas with an asterisk (*) because they inspired more ideation.

Next, we asked, what will the intervention be to encourage that behavior? We had already decided from ideation that we would move forward with the AI scheduler buddy, so we imagined our intervention to be the following: We will act as a Wizard of Oz agent who does the scheduling and planning for them and shares it with them as if we were an AI scheduling buddy/agent.

Intervention Study: How?

Below is our procedure for conducting the study, including data collection plan:
1. Ask each participant to send 3-5 times that they are free. This gives the participant (and us) flexibility in terms of changes to their schedule.

2. Act as an “AI” (using the Wizard of Oz technique) that generates 3-5 event plans/cards, each containing a social activity they can choose to engage in. For example, an event card might read, “8pm-9pm Monday @ Coho: Jazz Night!” or “3pm-4pm Tuesday @ The Oval: Afternoon Walk!”

• Ask each of our participants to give the name and number of 2-3 friends who they’d like to see this week. We will not be directly asking for the friends’ availability, since we will leave some agency to our participants to decide when to make plans.
  • If the friends’ schedule changes, then they can simply choose another event card.
• Create events based on the times that the participant is free, with varied places or activities around campus.

• Contact each of the people who the participant wants to interact with and give them the event cards. With this, they can choose to attend/not. 
• Ask our participants to let these people know that we will be contacting them to schedule so that it’s not out of nowhere.

3. Schedule as many social interactions for the participant as possible, ideally one per day.

• Survey at least the participant after the event, plus their friend, if possible. This will gauge how they felt about the event that was planned for them.

4. Interview our participants after the study. (More on desired data below.)

Intervention Study: Who?

We recruited people who are in their last year on campus, plus their friends who we are scheduling the interaction for. This included a mix of people from our baseline study, plus new people who still met the criteria of being a student in their final year.

Key Question + Desired Data

What question do we want to answer?

Will people hang out with their friends if the scheduling is done for them?

What data might we want to collect?

• Stress levels when going through this procedure, versus their current way of scheduling plans

• Quality of interaction
  • Do they like having autonomy? How much control do users actually want when planning out their social life? Or do they like having a little surprise?
• Enjoyment of activity and spending time with a friend
• How is the “AI” learning?
  • Acknowledging that the capabilities of AI are very different from the beginning vs. the end
• Feelings toward the “AI agent” itself
  • Trust, if/how it influences the way you feel toward the social plans
  • This could be considered more after the study has concluded

We look forward to working with our participants throughout the week and hearing from them in their post-study interviews to see our results!