I have always struggled with reading – words take much time to form, deciphering symbols and patterns makes me feel like I'm decoding the German Enigma messages with nothing more than a pen and paper. I am Dyslexic.
However, Dyslexia is not me. Fortunately (or unfortunately, if you ask my girlfriend), I am gifted with my father's stubbornness – I refuse to be defeated by my learning difficulty. I read slowly? I give myself more time. It's hard to read? I read it twice.
As you probably imagined, this is incredibly inefficient. But I stubbornly burn hours and hours a day reading, and re-reading, over and over again.
Until one fine day, I chanced upon two videos by Ali Abdaal which, as cliché as it may sound, blew my mind. He shared two evidence-based study strategies: Active Recall, and Spaced Repetition.
I religiously followed his advice; I immediately bought Anki and sought to create magical flashcards that were supposed to help me study better. But there was a problem, Anki sucked. It's user experience was terrible; I was spending more time figuring out how to use Anki than actually studying.
Frustrated, but still religiously devoted to the strategies, I sought out other solutions.
AnkiApp: I didn't get past the login page, the app kept crashing out
SuperMemo: No support for formatting mathematical equations
Quizlet: Too focused on learning languages
I had enough! This exercise in futility made me resort to using an Excel spreadsheet to study for the past semester.
This simple spreadsheet was a paradigm shift in how I studied. I stopped re-reading the lecture notes. Instead, I read it once, made a list of questions, and constantly quizzed myself, recording how I performed for each question. If I found it challenging, I would test myself again the next day. If it was easy, I would test myself again in a longer duration in order to combat the forgetting curve.
But it was incredibly tedious. I had to manually calculate when was the next date to quiz myself, it was incredibly annoying to type my answer as I had to insert a new row and then delete it after. Inserting pictures ruined the spreadsheet's formatting, formatting code was unfeasible: I couldn't multi-color a single cell.
Enough! Nothing I tried has been satisfactory. If an adequate solution does not yet exist, I will create it myself!
To make studywithme.ai simple to use on any screen size, I am adopting a minimalistic theme and a mobile-first development approach.
I based the design on Apple's Reminders and drew a sketch.
Then, I mocked up a wireframe using Sketch App.
To focus on what really matters, I adopted Li Hongyi's methodology.
P1 – If not done we don't launch
P2 – Important but can launch without if needed
P3 – Nice to have
| Feature | Priority |
|---|---|
| Allow users to create an account | P1 |
| Require users to verify email | P1 |
| P1 | |
| Allow users to rearrange their Nav Bar | P1 |
| Allow users to rearrange Questions in a Topic | P1 |
| P1 | |
| P1 | |
| P1 | |
| P1 | |
| Allow users to archive Subjects / Topics | P1 |
| Auto-backup Database | P2 |
| Add a Light Theme | P2 |
| Adjust the time before retesting a question by Topic / Subject | P2 |
| Inform user they have x questions that they need to revise daily via Push Notifications / Telegram / Email | P2 |
| Create a Landing Page | P2 |
| P2 | |
| Tag topics to a color theme | P2 |
| Undo / Redo | P2 |
| Search for a Subject / Topic / Question | P2 |
| P2 | |
| Import decks from other apps like Anki / Excel | P3 |
| Support handwriting | P3 |
| Allow users to share their subjects with others on a Marketplace | P3 |
| Allow users to leave reviews on a Subject in a Marketplace | P3 |
| Help users to create good questions by detecting bad questions (NLP) and offering guides in a tooltip | P3 |
| Allow users to charge others for access to their subjects | P3 |
| Create a community forum to allow people to discuss decks | P3 |
Name: Koh Zheng Qiang Shawn
Matriculation Number: A0185892L