After collecting some data on user interviews to determine what to ask to a larger audience. Survey was consisted of 21 questions and 4 of them was related to demographics to make sure we have a distributed audience (you can refer to the original survey results below this section to view demographic data).
Since this is a pre-employment assignment and I do not have lots of time, I have collected merely 38 participants. I am aware of the fact that this is a quite small sample rate and the majority of the participants resides and studies in Turkey. Yet for the sake of this task I would assume this survey had better demographic distribution and have an ample amount of sample rate, hope you would understand the inherent limitations here.
Below there will be commentary on the results only mentioning worthy insights (again for the sake of the scope of course but please let me know if I miss something).
The original survey lives here: https://forms.gle/AsYC2gpSYLwsDEwZ9
The numbers document used for the graphs is here: https://www.icloud.com/numbers/035rrLvQ8TEIRiSvlc5oRkVcw#Student_Research_Methods
On average the majority of the students tend to work 1-10 hours in a week. For studying purposes Physical Notebook is used by participants close to 75%, all of them use Computers and Smartphone is a little bit more than half the participants.
There is a disparity when asked the tools to take notes however. To my surprise, Physical Notebook is still the king with more than 75%, computer does not protect its place and Taking Photos has the second place. Whys of those results has to be followed by more interviews and filed research, but again this would be far out of the scope of this assignment.
This results have a lot to talk about. When asked how many Lecture Messaging Groups participants are currently involved, the highest percentage of the participants are involved in more than 5 groups! I think this area deserves a shot to create an MVP to replace those services. Compare this with the cloud storage solutions the results are almost inverse, the highest percentage is belong to the group that has no involvement with cloud storage. Of course this needs a lot of followup research but if we only consider this data, it shows that the messaging groups can be even more important than the cloud/community storage.
Considering Google Drive’s and WhatsApp’s popularities in Turkey, it is not surprising those two services have a definitively market leadership. This data may be used to derive familiar user patterns for developing new features.
Virtually all of the participants are still using the local drives of their computers despite the cloud storage is also being used aside by almost the half of the users. Smartphone local disk however is underutilized.