Campus Connection

A project on user experience

Disclaimer: The following work was taken from a group project that I led. Therefore, not all work is completely my own and in the documentation the team is referred to as "we". A full list of my contributions can be found at the bottom of this page.

1. Early Stages

2. Research and Development

3. Next Steps

4. Contributions

First steps

Finding our problem space

User interviews

Development

Secondary interviews

Creating Our Presentation

Table of Contents

EARLY STAGES

     For this project, we were tasked with imagining the future of hybrid learning and how we can improve the current tools and processes used during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first step was researching what tools have already been released and widely used. Some of these included Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom, and many more. Our initial steps included:

  • Interviewing students who have previously taken classes online.
  • Understanding what tools they used and where they excelled or fell flat.
  • Is there a solution that is already feasible, or does the space need something completely new?
  • Understanding our design space and what type of users and classes we wanted to focus on.

     The first thing we did was research current applications and made a list of what we liked and didn’t like. This helped us brainstorm ways in which they could be improved. Since we liked specific parts of all of the applications we researched, but didn’t feel like any singular one was the best, we decided we wanted to design a new program.

Finding Our problem space

     Our problem space took a long time to develop, as there are many ways you can specify to certain user groups. The first thing we decided on was that we wanted to use hybrid learning for a lecture formatted class, since almost every student will have a lecture-type class at some point. We decided that we wanted to design both an instructor and a student view. We wanted the program to be an extension of brightspace to be used by Purdue students and staff.

     An ideation of the student’s view during an online lecture. In the left panel, it lists the classes they are currently enrolled in that use our service.

     This is an ideation of the instructor’s view. It includes more tools that can be used in class, as well as having a list of everyone that is in attendance, which is automatically kept track of by the system.

USer personas

     Through the creation of user personas we as a team were able to better understand our target user and the possible scenarios that could take place. These are based on personal as well as general knowledge gathered in the interview stages.

Research & Development

     Once we had a possible product idea, we started conducting interviews and gathering data to see what changes would need to be made to our project, or if we needed to scrap it completely. We conducted six interviews of students who had been in online classes before to help us understand their experiences.

     From our interviews, we made a list of the positives and negatives associated with online learning. We also made a list of possible improvements that were suggested, or that were obvious focus points based on the interviews. We were able to narrow them down to three main things that we could focus on:

USer Interviews

  • Tracking participation & attendance
  • More visual or interactive features
  • Features such as a collaborative whiteboard or having all their files in the app

     From here, we decided we wanted to focus on how engagement specifically could be improved. In order to do this, we would need to narrow down the amount of features we planned on adding. All of these ideas would eventually be moved to the Next Steps section of our project, as we could not fully flesh them out now.

USer Scenario

     From the initial user persona we created in the earlier stages of development we then began to create a plausible user scenario. Which outlines our main problem and how a user would interact with our product as a means to increase engagement which is our main area of focus. We decided to further delve into the perspective of a teacher in lecture whose goal is to increase class engagement.

Development

     We had many ideas for GoldBoard and focussing on only a few initial ideas was difficult, but in the end we decided to focus on the whiteboards and the participation and engagement of students during an online class. Using Figma, we created some mockups of a lecturer's view as well as a student's view of GoldBoard.

Student view of lecturer

Student view of Whiteboard

     For the Students view of the lecturer view features In-Class assignments popups, toggles between whiteboard views and lecture views, a chatbox for the class, a raising hand button, and other buttons such as mute, speakers, and video buttons already featured on popular video chatting apps.

     Here the student will be able to see what the lecturer is writing on their virtual whiteboard. They will also be able to write, post-it, type, or highlight notes on the lecturer’s whiteboard. Only students will be able to see their own notes. After the class ends, students will able to save a copy of the notes taken in class. The more a student participates in the class, the more participation points they get. If they take notes, highlight, post-it, chat, raise their hands, etc, they will increase their participation score which will be posted on Brightspace directly after the class ends.

Lecturer View

     The Lecturer’s view is a little bit different. They are able to write their notes which are able to be viewed by the students. They can also mute all students if needed. On the left side of the screen will be an attendance counter which shows all present students. This list of present students will be available after the class ends, as well as the whiteboard. This lecturer is an example of a recorded lecture which will be directly posted to Brightspace after the class ends in case a student was unable to attend.

Secondary interviews

     The secondary interviews allow us to go back to our users and make sure the product we have designed so far is still meeting their needs. This keeps us from getting too complex or losing sight of the problems that need to be solved. Luckily, we stuck very close to our original feedback, as well as adding a couple other changes inspired by it, and it managed to pay off in the secondary interviews. Our users loved the product and wished it was something that they could actually have and use. They were also able to give us more ideas that we would later use in our Next Steps section.

Creating our Presentation

     Now that we had a fleshed out idea for our final product and got the green light from our user group, it was time to focus on pitching our idea. We found a slide deck design that matched our idea and started thinking about how we wanted to present. We created this outline for the presentation:

  •  Title Slide and Introduction
  • Early Stages
            ○ Includes original problem space and thought                            process
  • Research and Development I
            ○ Includes user interviews, what changes we made,                    and why we decided to focus on engagement
  • Research and Development II
            ○ Includes final product design and secondary                            interview feedback
  • Next Steps
            ○ Includes problems we would focus on if we had                       more time and how they would improve engagement
  • Questions

     With this layout, it was much easier to condense our presentation to include only the most important talking points. It also allowed our slide deck to be mostly visual, with our group explaining the details in greater depth.
     After our presentation, we got some great feedback about some things we had forgotten to mention in our presentation. The two that came up the most were going more in depth about who our user group actually was and explaining what feedback we got from our secondary interviews. Luckily, we were able to explain more in the questions portion since we had allotted enough time. The only changes we had to make to the slide deck itself was increasing the size of the text in the scenario section, as it was difficult for our audience to read.

Next Steps

     Our Next Steps section is an area that we had to revisit many times throughout the duration of this project due to all the hopes and ideas we had for this product. After we had decided to focus on engagement-based features, we looked at the list of all of the features we left out and were able to group them into four main points. These points were the following:

1. Implement Goldboard across every Purdue campus

     With Goldboard being an extension of Brightspace, this first step would be relatively simple. The part we could not get to was inspired by project two. We wanted students from other Purdue campuses to be able to take an online class for a class that may not be offered at their campus. This would allow students to meet across campuses and greatly improve the range of classes that are offered.

2. Expand to other colleges

     Goldboard was made with college-level lecture classes in mind because this is a format that almost every college student will endure. In the future, we hope to expand our services to other colleges and partner with other learning services like Brightspace. Eventually, Goldboard could be used across all age groups during events like snow days or sickness.

3. Add more layout options depending on the class type

     This is an idea that we came up with while imagining the far-off future of Goldboard. We were inspired by Notion to have each professor's classroom tailored to them and their class type. Our idea was that we would offer a large range of tools or features from a professor to select from using a toggle list. That way, no given class would be overwhelmed by too many options while also giving the professor more customizability. Since they would be choosing from a toggle list, the features or tools would have a degree of similarity that will make them easy to recognize and get used to using.

4. Add a breakout room-type group project space

     Breakout rooms were mentioned in our initial user interviews as something that seems necessary, but are never enjoyable. Our idea for the breakout rooms was a mixture of Zoom’s breakout rooms and Discord’s group chats and voice channels. These rooms could be used for things like group projects, study sessions, or easy access online office hours. Who can access a particular room can be controlled by the professor, while some are always open to the whole class.

     With so many ideas in mind, it was hard to not want to continue this project as it seemed like a feasible product for the market. Unfortunately for the sake of this project, these ideas will continue to be ideas.

Contributions

  • One user interview and followup interview
  • Brainstorm and Ideation
  • Created original ideation sketches
  • Created figma pros, cons, and improvements board
  • Took notes from desk critiques
  • Created name for final product
  • Outlined and completed presentation slide deck; helped assign speaking parts
  • Presented Next Steps section of presentation and answered questions
  • Completed full documentation (not including Development section)
  • Made changes to slide deck after presentation
  • Turned in final deliverables

Disclaimer: The following work was taken from a group project that I led. Therefore, not all work is completely my own and in the documentation the team is referred to as "we". The work listed above is what I contributed to this project.