My First Student Interviews Challenged Some of My EBO Assumptions

For a long time, most of EBO existed inside my own thinking.

I had spent months thinking about students, consistency, motivation, accountability, privacy and what a useful study product might look like.

I had documents.

Prototypes.

Research questions.

Product decisions.

Far too many notes.

Eventually, though, there is a point where thinking harder stops helping.

You have to talk to the people you are supposedly building for.

So I finally started doing student interviews.

The first two conversations were with people close to me: my bestfriend and my younger sister.

That is obviously not market validation.

Two people cannot tell me what students as a whole want.

But they can expose assumptions.

And that happened almost immediately.

I tried to ask about behaviour before ideas

I did not want to begin by explaining EBO and asking:

"Would you use this?"

That question is almost useless.

People are usually polite.

Ideas sound better when they are hypothetical.

And saying you would use something costs nothing.

So I tried to start with what already happens.

What does studying normally look like?

What happened during the last week?

Were any sessions postponed?

Why?

What tools have you already tried?

How do you personally decide whether a study session was actually productive?

Those questions gave me much more interesting answers than asking whether a productivity app sounded useful.

Plans are not always the problem

One conversation included a recently postponed study session.

The reason was basically procrastination.

What happened afterward was interesting, though.

The response was to make another schedule to recover the missed work.

That reminded me of something I have experienced myself.

Students can already have plans.

Sometimes very detailed ones.

The problem is not necessarily knowing what should happen.

The problem is making it happen consistently.

That sounds obvious, but it matters.

It is easy to accidentally build software around the visible part of a problem while missing where the actual failure occurs.

That is something I want to keep testing.

Existing tools create friction in unexpected ways

We also talked about productivity tools that had already been tried.

A few frustrations appeared.

Some experiences felt restrictive.

Some became boring over time.

Sometimes the reward for continuing did not feel meaningful enough.

Paid restrictions could also affect how the experience felt.

I am deliberately not turning those comments into conclusions.

Two conversations are nowhere near enough.

But they gave me better questions for future interviews.

Why do students stop using productivity tools?

Is the problem usefulness?

Routine?

Motivation?

Too much friction?

Too little feedback?

Something else entirely?

Those answers matter much more than simply knowing whether someone has downloaded an app before.

One assumption did not survive the conversation cleanly

There was also an idea about motivation that I had been relatively comfortable with.

One response basically told me:

That does not motivate me.

That was useful.

Not because one answer disproves anything.

It does not.

But because it reminded me that a mechanism that sounds psychologically reasonable in a product document may do absolutely nothing for a particular person.

"Accountability."

"Motivation."

"Social pressure."

These are neat words.

Human behaviour is messier.

Different people may respond to completely different things.

So instead of assuming I understand how motivation should work, I now have something specific to investigate with more students.

That is exactly what I wanted from these conversations.

Productivity was described as more than time

Another answer I found interesting was about what makes a study session feel productive.

The response focused on what actually happened during studying rather than simply how long the session lasted.

That matters to me.

Time is convenient.

It is measurable.

It gives you a clean number.

Three hours looks more productive than one hour.

But everyone who has studied seriously knows that those numbers can lie.

An hour of focused work can be worth far more than several hours of distracted effort.

Again, one interview does not prove anything.

But it strengthened a question I already had:

How much should a study product care about time, and how much should it care about what happened during that time?

I want to keep asking people that.

Privacy came up twice

The clearest repeated theme from these first conversations was privacy.

Both people, in different ways, expressed discomfort with the idea that studying automatically means exposing everything to other people.

That was useful because EBO has always involved questions about accountability and visibility.

But there is an important difference between:

helping someone feel accountable

and

making them feel watched.

These interviews did not give me a finished solution.

I am intentionally keeping it that way.

What they gave me was a question worth testing:

How much control do students expect over the information they share while using a study product?

That is now something I want to ask much more directly in future interviews.

My sister gave me a surprisingly useful perspective

I did not conduct a full formal interview with my sister.

She is younger, and there was no reason to force a giant research script into the conversation.

But her reaction was still useful.

Her basic instinct was that people would probably feel more comfortable if they had control over what they shared.

Simple.

Very obvious once someone says it.

But useful.

It also reminded me that privacy is not only a policy question.

It is a product-experience question.

A privacy policy can say everything is handled responsibly.

The user still experiences privacy through what the product allows them to control.

That is something I had not been thinking about enough.

Two interviews do not mean I have discovered the market

This part matters.

I have spoken to two people.

One is my bestfriend.

One is my younger sister.

I cannot publish an article saying:

"Students want this."

I do not know that.

I cannot say:

"This feature does not work."

I do not know that either.

I cannot say EBO has been validated.

It has not.

What I have are early signals.

That is all.

A few assumptions now deserve more scrutiny than they did before.

A few questions have become more interesting.

And one theme appeared twice independently.

That is enough to continue researching.

It is not enough to declare victory.

This changed how I think about interviews

Before doing them, part of me treated interviews as something I had to complete before returning to the more exciting work.

Building.

Designing.

Changing the product.

Now I understand their value a little better.

An interview is useful partly because it can make development less comfortable.

Someone can dismiss an idea you liked.

Define productivity differently from you.

Care about something you barely considered.

Ignore something you thought would be important.

That friction is valuable.

It is much cheaper to discover a questionable assumption in conversation than after spending weeks building around it.

I also learned that I need more diverse interviews

Talking to people close to me is an easy place to begin.

It should not be where the research ends.

The next conversations need to expand beyond my immediate circle.

Different students.

Different study habits.

Different exams.

Different levels of consistency.

People who already use productivity tools.

People who hate them.

People who study socially.

People who prefer being completely alone.

The disagreements may end up being more useful than the similarities.

The current findings are questions, not answers

After these first conversations, my notes are not:

Build this. Remove that. Students definitely want this other thing.

They are closer to:

Investigate privacy more carefully.

Do not assume one form of motivation works for everyone.

Ask students how they define a productive session.

Understand why existing tools lose people over time.

That feels healthier.

The product does not need another burst of features just because I completed two interviews.

It needs more evidence.

For once, the next step is not coding

That might be the hardest part for me.

If I find an interesting product problem, my instinct is to start designing the solution.

But right now, I do not think that is the right move.

I need more conversations.

If the same themes keep appearing independently, they become more meaningful.

If nobody else mentions them, that is useful too.

If future interviews completely contradict these first two, even better.

That would mean I learned something before building around the wrong assumption.

EBO started as something I wanted for myself.

If it is ever going to become useful for students beyond me, I have to get better at separating:

what I think should work

from

what people actually experience.

Two interviews are not enough to answer that.

But they were enough to finally start asking the right questions.