After months of working on Cohort, we finally have a working version of the app.
It's been a lot of building and changing things, finding and fixing problems, and adapting. What started as an idea about studying alongside friends is now something we can actually use.
Cohort has a main study hall where students can study quietly together, breakout rooms for smaller groups, personal study timers, and short check-ins after each session. The goal is to study alongside other students without turning it into another social media platform.
Just because we've built it doesn't mean we know if it works, however; our original questions was whether studying alongside other people could help students stay focused. We have our own opinions about it, but now we want to find out what happens when other students actually use Cohort.
But, we still need to know what happens when other students use Cohort and whether it really helps them.
Next, we'll be testing with school students to test Cohort hoping to get 30-100 people to join during the testing phase; But before that, we plan to test with just the three of us, Ryan, Jeremy, and me, eventually expanding to more people.
What We've Been Doing This Summer
Here at Project Cognify, we've been hard at work working on Cohort; A video call service dedicated to helping students study as best they can utilizing FOMO.
We haven't had much time this summer, but it's getting closer to the point where we can release an Alpha version of the product confidently everyday. Already, we've gone over multiple versions of prototypes to build and ideas to test out. (All backed by research of course.)
After the Alpha version releases sometime in September to October, we plan to start testing it to see if using it has any actual results. Due to testing reasons, we plan to make this invite-only when it releases.
To elaborate on the previously stated testing, this would be the start of Phase III, where multiple people would be tested using cohort for research concerning if Cohort could have any real world usage.
We cannot provide a specific date of release at this time, so thank you for your continued patience.
Finding a Home for Project Cognify
By the end of Phase I, our research findings, survey results, interview notes, and half-finished ideas were scattered across three different Google Docs folders and a stack of notebooks. None of us could find anything anymore.
What we actually needed wasn't better file organization. It was somewhere that could hold the story of the project, not just the files.
So this site isn't really a portfolio. It's closer to a running record of how our thinking has changed as we've gone from asking questions to running a survey to (eventually) building something.
Phase II starts now, and we're planning to keep writing this stuff down as we go, even the parts that don't make us look like we knew what we were doing.
If it works, someone should be able to read this front to back later and understand not just what Cohort ended up being, but why it ended up that way.
How the Research Changed Our Hypothesis
By this point we'd finished the literature review and had responses back from the survey. Once we actually sat down and looked at it all together, one pattern kept showing up, and it wasn't the one we went in looking for.
We'd built our original hypothesis around FOMO, but the data didn't really back that up. Motivation and something closer to social presence kept coming up instead, in the papers and in what students told us.
So the question shifted. We started out asking
Can FOMO help students stay focused?
and ended up asking something closer to
Can simply knowing that other students are working alongside you make it easier to stay engaged?
which became the focus for the next phase.
Neither of us loved dropping the original idea, honestly. We'd been talking about it for months. But the whole point of doing the research first was to let it change our minds if it needed to, and apparently it needed to.
What We Found in the Survey Findings
After weeks of drafting and redrafting questions, our survey finally went live, and for the first time we were hearing opinions that weren't our own.
Some of it confirmed what we expected. A lot of it didn't. Students described losing focus in ways we hadn't really thought about: feeling overwhelmed, not knowing where to start, or (the one that surprised us) actually focusing better just knowing their friends were studying at the same time, even without talking to them.
By the time we'd read through most of the responses, we'd basically stopped caring whether our original hypothesis was right. We were more interested in the questions the answers were raising.
Why We Started Sharing Everything
We went back and forth on whether to wait until we had actual results before posting anything about the project. We decided waiting didn't make much sense.
The Instagram exists because we wanted people to see the process, not just whatever we end up shipping: the dead-end ideas, the surveys we had to redo, the stuff that surprised us along the way.
Research doesn't move in a straight line. Sometimes you end up with a totally different question than the one you started with, and we'd rather show that messiness than hide it.
If someone reading this ends up learning something from watching us mess around with a research project, or wants to go start their own, that's honestly as good an outcome as Cohort actually working.
Designing the Survey
I figured writing a survey would take an afternoon. It took closer to three weeks, mostly because every question I wrote turned out to be leading people toward an answer without my noticing. I'd reread something and realize it only made sense if you already assumed FOMO was the answer.
This is also around when we started actually meeting on a regular schedule instead of just texting whenever. I'd bring a draft, and Jeremy and Ryan would pick it apart, less "good job" and more "wait, why are you assuming that."
It stopped feeling like a group project and started feeling like we were actually trying to find something out.
Choosing Research Before Building
Like most student projects, our first instinct was to start making a product.
Idle, action, puzzle, strategy, plenty of fun game ideas came to mind.
But we realized that without a confirmed problem, none of those ideas would go anywhere.
So we made a call that ended up shaping everything after it: no building until we actually understood the problem. That meant reading research, writing survey questions, and doing interviews before touching any code, which was a lot less fun than it sounds.
It's slowed us down more than once since then, and there are days it felt like overkill for a school project. But so far I still think it was the right call.
Giving the Project a Name
For the first few weeks, we called it Project Focus. Whenever we talked about it, we just called it "the focus project."
As the idea became more defined, we realized it deserved its own identity.
We went through a long, mostly bad list of name ideas before Jeremy suggested Cognify, and it stuck. It fit what we were actually trying to understand: less about productivity hacks, more about how people think and stay engaged.
Jeremy also put together our first logo around then, which is when this stopped feeling like something we talked about after school and started feeling like a real commitment.
Getting the Team Together
I didn't want to do this alone, so the first person I called was Jeremy, and the two of us called Ryan before we'd even really decided what we were building. We'd worked together on a game jam the year before, and even though we don't think about problems the same way at all, none of us were the type to just nod along with whatever someone else said.
When I actually explained the idea, neither of them asked what app we were going to build. Ryan just asked what we actually knew about the problem so far. The honest answer was "not much," and somehow that was the answer that made me want to keep going with them specifically.
That one conversation is still the thing I remember most clearly out of everything we've discussed since.
Was It Worth Investigating?
For a couple of weeks it was just something I brought up occasionally, not really a project. Then I started actually reading about it, and it turned into one.
I went down a rabbit hole on attention, motivation, and FOMO specifically, since that's the angle that made the most intuitive sense to me at the time.
What if the same psychological forces that keep people engaged in games could also be used to help students stay focused while learning?
That was the hypothesis I started with. It felt obviously right at the time, which in hindsight probably should have made me more suspicious of it, not less.
How It All Started
Jeremy and I stayed up until 2 AM playing a newly released game one night, and the next morning I couldn't stop thinking about how those hours had just disappeared. I've never once lost track of time studying like that.
Why do some things hold our attention effortlessly, while others take everything we have?
That's the question I couldn't shake, and it's basically where this whole thing started.