User Experience Researcher, User Experience Designer
14 weeks
Figma, Adobe Photoshop, miro.io, paper and pen
Yasmeen Shakour, Sophia Jacobs, Sarah Higuchi-Crowell, Katie Amidon
School during the the formative years of 5-11 is so important. It saddens me to think of the lack of social interaction and movement remote schooling imposes on elementary schoolers. I had to find a way to help younger students stay engaged in school and find a way to socialize.
Online schooling negatively impacts socialization, focus and the desire for children to be engaged with learning. It also takes away opportunities for children to be physically active during school days.
I first looked into market to see what similar products already to asses their strength and weaknesses. What could I learn from these existing products.
I learned:
To get more insight into what out target audience I conducted interviews with children aged 5-11, their parents, and elementary school teachers. As group we interviewed 15 users.
We analyzed the data using an affinity map to come up with insights, and from the insights, actionable findings to apply to our design.
The key findings:
To help myself and my team stay true to the users research, I created personas that represent the different users we interviewed. I created two primary personas representing the kids, and two secondary personas representing a teacher and a parent. We referred to these personas throughout the rest of our research and design process to create a user centered product.
My team and I created written scenarios and sketched storyboards to help empathize with our users. The scenario I made explains how, when, and why a child would use our product. This way, there is an idea of where the design will fit into the users life.
We created a user flow to conceptualize every step a user would take to complete tasks on our project. This helped with the next steps because we know what we needed to create to make the product possible.
We broke up the sections of the user flow and each created a paper prototype. We chose paper prototypes because of how quickly we can make them so we can also test them, change based on feedback, and repeat. Below is my part of the paper prototype (a walk thorough video).
Taking into account the feedback we received on our paper prototypes from parents and a convince sample, we created wireframes of our web app. Below are the main page wireframes, I created the task book.
We then added content and turn the wireframe into a hi-fi prototype that we could continue to test and change. Below is the video of our first iteration of the hi-fi prototype. I narrate the video and created the Task Book part of the design as well as aided in the creation of the other pages.
We conducted 5 usability tests, 2 of which I conducted myself. The user tests included........
The key findings from the tests are:
When users were asked to navigate to the "Point Shop" page, they had difficulty finding it as it’s not in the navigation bar, rather it can only be accessed from the “Closet Page”.
Solution: Add the "Point Shop" to the side navigation since it is an important part of the app. This way it is much easier to access and reduces the number of clicks and therefore the time it takes to navigate the app.
The users were unaware they had completed tasks such as buying an item from the "Point Shop" or complete a task in the "Task Book". The only feedback was a point change and a small check mark, but otherwise there was no feedback letting the user know their task was completed successfully.
Solution: Give the user feedback by way of pop-up announcing what the user just did so they are aware their actions went through.
Users mentioned that the red color of the buttons to message and call on a classmate's desk signaled to them a negative message causing them to not want to click the buttons. This was an unintentional signal on our part. Also, the "Later Tasks" tab in the "Task Book" did not have a good affordance meaning, it was not clear to the users how it can or should be used because the environment didn't indicate it.
Solution: Make sure our signals are clear and intentional, and no confusing signals are being given out. We changed the colors of the red buttons and got rid of the "Later Tasks" completely and instead replaced it with a clear finished tasks tab.
Although the class for this project has finished, this is an important app for me and I want to continue working on it. Looking forward, I would like to clean up the interactions and add more pages, so that the app is more realized. I also would like to test the prototype with more of our primary users, children aged 5-11, to ensure the design is user-centered. I'm very proud of this successful project.
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