Case Study

Role

For this project, I took on the role of UX Researcher, UX Designer, and UI/Visual Designer. I conducted market and user research. I also defined the product with deliverables such as a persona, feature roadmap, card sorting activity, and the user and task flows. I was also responsible for ideating designs, conducting usability tests, and applying revisions.

Overview

Original challenge was to create an intuitive and effective way for creators to set up course goals, outline the course, fine tune the design, and set it with early adopters.

The goal of this particular project was to identify any usability issues with the beta release and determine the critical features to prioritize for the next iteration of the product.

The Outcome

Two key achievements from the project listed below:

Implement a design process to help our team establish more structure on how we conduct our work and allow other teams to gain visibility
Improve usability across the platform by 85%
Establish a design kit to maintain consistency in the look and feel across different parts of the platform

1.

2.

4.

Discovery

Anchor 1

Objective

With the challenge in mind and to guide me through my research, I set objectives below:

Goal: Give Sojourner an edge by providing superior usability; Gain a better understanding of the product;

Focus efforts in EdTech, Know the market to inform design decisions

What we want to learn: Existing features in market; Customizable software; Industry norms/trends for content and design

Answering the objectives

Competitive analysis

Solidify goals and what we want to learn
Study and choose standard UX approaches
Organize observations and features
Summarize findings, pull in features that align with client goals, include “wow” factor

The table below showcases some of the design elements, interface features that competitors were

using on their platforms.

What users are saying

After completing my topic and market research, I completed a series of user surveys and conducted interviews to find out the below:

Please list any courses you teach.
Briefly describe your current role in course development. This could be courses taught by you or others.
Do you collaborate with others on any elements of your courses? If yes, please share their roles.
What is your experience level designing online course materials?
Rate your comfort level with web based technology.
What is your openness to using Educational Technologies?

Survey themes and interview highlights

From the surveys and interviews, I found that:

Platforms have high learning curve
Poor usability
Don't use entire textbooks
Data needs are student centered
Student engagement of greatest importance
Analytics need to be used ethically

Research summary

From the research we developed 3 key insights:

57% of the users felt the course set up takes a lot of time
35% of the users felt the course analytics is hard to access
85% of the users felt there was no visibility into course structure

I decided to focus making learning science inherent in course design and providing design analytics and

for instructors/instructional designers

Ideate & Design

Anchor 3

Flow

Wireframes

Based on the above problems identified, I worked towards addressing these pains by coming up with potential solutions:

Reducing the number of steps to complete course set up
Establishing clearer visual form hierarchy by grouping related fields

Hi Fidelity Design

Design plan:

Use familiar terminology that matches the user’s mental model of course creation
Use standard layout and clear iconography to ensure quick learnability
Create customizable dashboard of tools so novices are not overwhelmed and experts can work efficiently
Provide visual and textual hints when user hovers mouse over tool with the option to learn more

Visual design

Before proceeding with any type of high-fidelity design, I put together a UI kit that encompassed the companies look and feel. The company did not have an existing style guide in place so wanted to ensure all the elements tied back to the overall companies aesthetics.

Anchor 4

Test

Testing goals

What we want to know:

Validate our project goals
Assess usability
Discover anything we missed
And Measure our participants’ overall feelings on the product

Things that worked

Things that didn't work

Results

Two key takeaways:

Create a strategic plan to launch an MVP. This helps deal with out-of-scope requests that could potentially derail the project and helps deliver a quality product in time.
User testing doesn't end after development. Design is a constant iteration of improving the experience for the end user. Always find ways to collect and listen to your user's feedback.

Overall product results

As this is still a beta product, felt it was important to get some attitudinal measures about how participants felt about the product as a whole.

4.79/5

Finds product innovative

4/5

Consider switching product

4.5/5

Finds product relevant

3.8/5

Recommend product

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