Background
Client: A large, online proprietary learning environment
Project: Create a first time use experience for students within the learning environment
Research
While the contextual interviews were going on and we were aggregation of resources currently available to students my team recognized that creating a first time use experience would be out of scope for the resources we had available. I also found out that students were struggling when changes were made to the learning platform and that they were going to their instructors when they needed help.
Goal Setting
This research determined the goal for the project. We needed to be able to let students know when we made changes to their learning platform and how the changes affected their workflow, to give instructors more time teaching the class material and less time teaching how to navigate changes to the platform.
Requirements
I worked with my product manager determining the requirements and constraints of the project; to develop a feature dependent framework to introduce new features and changes to the classroom. The framework needed to be able to work in the current release ecosystem, and be simple enough for the business to own it and fill in the blanks for future changes to the platform. It would need to consist of 3 levels of detail, depending on the complexity of the change, and it would require a library where students would be able to reference information, as needed, throughout the class.
Ideation
I outlined three levels of the framework based on the complexity of potential changes in the classroom: a simple notification announcing a change, something that showed and told students exactly what had changed, and a test environment where they could interact and try out a change. I made each progressively more interactive based on the complexity of the change and its effect on students’ workflows.
Concepting
Several of the concepts focused heavily on exploring the changes because during the contextual interviews, 80% of the students we interviewed called themselves explorers when they were faced with new technology. However when they first enter a new class, there isn’t any data to interact with, which made this a fun design challenge to tackle.
Testing
When it came time to test the concepts, I wanted to learn how much information students needed to know, how much of an intrusion on their workflow they were comfortable with, and what learning style would be most effective for them. During concept testing it became clear that students really wanted to be able to interact with their classroom and figure out the changes for themselves, unless they felt a reason to learn more.
Conclusions
This helped me determine that the initial interaction needed to be highly focused with an intensive call to action. Additionally, I wanted to make sure that if students ignored the initial interaction, they would be able to easily find and access the information again if they needed help. Testing also revealed that contextual information was more helpful when students were able to interact with it, however it needed to be highly focused since our students don’t have a lot of time. Based on the findings of this study I was able to create an interactive wireframe that met the needs of all stakeholders while staying highly focused on users’ goals.
Jess Moore 