Critical Thinking Studio — a UX case study
The Background
Critical Thinking Studio is a start-up company that came to our team in October 2018 with a specific objective in mind, to create an app that facilitates the habit of thinking critically.
This objective is apart of Critical Thinking Studio’s larger, long term goal to introduce critical thinking as its own distinct branch under the broad category of self-improvement.
The owner of the company, Kristina Carroll, wants to increase public accessibility to exclusive course content she’s designed to achieve this goal.
Carroll teaches Secondary students at a learning academy full-time, and after observing an increasing demand for students to engage critically with content, she developed a course to help facilitate this habit. The resulting Critical Thinking course has become very popular at her academy.
The Timeline
Both the UX and UI teams were allotted 3 weeks in total to complete this project. On the UX side, the specific timeline entails:
The Team
The team consisted of one UI designer and four UX designers including myself:
The Challenge
The Critical Thinking course is currently inaccessible as its offered exclusively to a select group of students at the learning academy Carroll teaches at.
The Goals
After meeting with Carroll, we came up with the following goals:
- To take content that is currently exclusive and to make it more accessible
- To create an app that facilitates the habit of thinking critically
- Fulfill a desire to improve critical thinking
- To be exposed to current and up to date events in a unique way
- To widen their perspective about the world
- To challenge their way of thinking
After evaluating our client and user goals, we consolidated both into our larger project goal and deliverable:
To increase public accessibility to interactive tools and resources that foster the habit of critical thinking.
Domain Research
After figuring out our project goal, we delved into our research. The first thing we wanted to do is figure out was what other products exist in the self-improvement and higher learning domain.
We looked at the apps of the companies listed above and found that, while all of them aimed to facilitate learning in some way, none of them specifically created an interactive, social platform to encourage critical thinking. Although a few of them, especially Headspace, were useful in helping us envision how the Critical Thinking Course could be structured in an app.
Contextual Inquiry
Although we had a rough idea of how Carroll’s app could be structured, we needed to sit in one of her classes to be sure. Once we did, we had more insight on the type of content she taught, how it’s delivered and how we could structure it.
An example of one of the group activities Carroll facilitates is noted above. This specific activity was carried out in class and later inspired our team in creating a community feature within the app.
Surveys and Interviews
Prior to surveying and interviewing, we decided to create a plan to identify our goals:
From our survey data, we found a few key findings:
- From our research we found our users are between the ages of 18–30, with a 50/50 gender split with most of them being students.
- Of those users 60% already use self improvement resources in fitness, meditation and higher learning.
- Within the 60% of people who use self improvement resources, 44% considered critical thinking an important skill they would want to improve.
Affinity Diagram
After conducting a few in-person interviews for Step 2, we organized our survey and interview research into an affinity diagram to see what patterns we could observe.
The main patterns we found were:
- Motivations to use self-improvement apps include being more mindful in everyday life, bettering oneself and growth.
- The top self-improvement apps used are Headspace as well as various yoga apps
- People really liked the simplicity, user friendliness and the creation of community in regards to the apps they used
- On average, people used their self improvement apps daily
- The hobbies of our users mostly include activities around fitness and sports
We used this insight to help create a user persona to represent our target demographic, as you’ll see below.
Persona
Persona Journey Map
Now that we’ve introduced you to our persona — let’s visualize why Gabriel’s goal might be to improve critical thinking and be exposed to current events in a unique way:
Gabriel is especially frustrated with wasting time on social media mindlessly scrolling through content — which leaves less time for him to do things he really enjoys, including reading books and thought-provoking articles.
Storyboard
Storyboarding is another useful way to visualize Gabriel’s frustrations. While we used it to identify his problem, we also visualize a solution going forward:
Gabriel wakes up and meditates before he starts his busy day at school. On the bus, he passes time using social media.
He goes to his classes and workouts with his peers having superficial conversations. Later on, Gabriel tries to study at home but finds himself wasting time on social media looking at dull content.
Gabriel’s friend introduces him to a critical thinking app that allows him to learn new concepts in a different way and share it with peers.
It’s clear in both the persona journey map and storyboard that Gabrielle is tired of wasting time on social media. He wants to engage critically with content in a new way in which he can share with peers. With the Critical Thinking Studio app, Gabrielle can do just that!
Before jumping ahead to the end result though, let’s break the app up into its key features and prioritize them.
Features prioritization
The affinity diagram, along with Carrol’s desired features for the app, helped us prioritize which features we would design for our app.
Some of the key must have’s include:
User notebook: to take notes while learning concepts and ideas users would like to remember
Vocabulary quiz: a feature for users to be tested on new vocabulary words
Interruptions: A practice of interjecting with questions while the user is learning in order for them to retain more information
A few nice to have’s include:
Incentives: to find a way to keep users engaged and return to the app
Community engagement: a platform where users could see other peoples responses to questions and communicate about topics
Although the Nice to Have’s were’t essential in our design, we decided that with time permitting, we would incorporate as many as we could into the design of the app.
User Flow
Once we prioritized the features, we went ahead and created a user flow to illustrate our user’s potential flows through the app:
After we visualized what the flows would look like through the app, it became clearer what the screens of the Critical Thinking Studio app would look like.
We began to design the screens and after testing, ended up with three different iterations of the app:
Low-Fi Prototype
Mid-Fi Prototype
Hi-Fi Prototype
While we designed our screens, we reflected on our research findings and incorporated specific design elements as a result:
- Inclusion of interruptions during course modules
Interruptions are a key interactive feature within the app, which catch a user in the middle of a module to test whether s/he is paying attention to the course material. Carrol uses interruptions during the course she teaches at the learning academy and in her experience, finds that it keeps her students engaged and thinking critically.
2. A notebook for users to take course notes in
Our client thought it was especially important to include a notebook within the app — so that users could take notes and reflect on their learnings from the course. Users can also easily refer back to the notes they took at a later date, which will help with their memory retention.
3. Critical quiz at the end of a course pack
Once the course pack is complete, the user is prompted to take a quiz that applies the concepts s/he has learned so far. This tests the user’s comprehension of course material in an interesting and engaging way.
4) A community platform to interact with
Although this was a nice to have, we managed to include it as part of our features within the app. With it, users can view peer responses to the same questions before rating them. This creates a community within the app that users can interact and engage with.
As we moved through each iteration into a higher fidelity, we addressed specific problems that came up during testing. We tested approximately 25 times and gave specific testing tasks with each iteration. The key problems that we identified were:
- Entering a module through arrows vs a circle:
People weren’t sure how to enter a module (i.e. lesson), they were unsure whether to enter through the circle or left and right arrows. We thought that once we digitized the prototype in mid-fi, users would recognize that they needed to enter the lesson through the circle. This was still a point of confusion in mid-fi so we removed the arrows and added a swiping feature to move between modules. We explain this feature during our on-boarding screens in hi-fi.
2. Interruptions unclear:
In both low and mid-fi, people were confused by the interruptions. They weren’t sure what they were, and so we thought that once we added colour in hi-fi, it would be more obvious it was an interruption. We had a chance to test hi-fi and realized that people still didn’t know what was going on, so we addressed it with an on-boarding screen.
3. Clearer on-boarding screens:
User’s weren’t entirely sure during both low-fi and mid-fi that they were moving through on-boarding screens, and so during our hi-fi we changed the language to help users recognize it better.
After moving through each iteration and addressing each problem that came up along the way, we polished our final prototype:
Hi-Fi Prototype on InVision
Did we address the challenge? Let’s revisit what it was:
The Critical Thinking course is currently inaccessible as its offered exclusively to a select group of students at the learning academy Carroll teaches at.
The design of Critical Thinking Studio app aims to fill a gap in the market and increase public accessibility to interactive tools and resources that foster the habit of critical thinking. Additionally, the ability to share content with friends on social media and within the app, creates a community in which peers can interact and engage critically with each other.
With only three weeks to put this project together, naturally some things were missed. Here is what we would love to revisit in the future:
- Incentives
- Functional Payment
- Error Screen
- Empty State page
- Communities within app
- Animated loading screen
- Scheduled reminders to use app
- Word bank page
In consideration of our client goals, designing monetary incentives + payment options tops the list of our future iterations. We would also love to expand on our communities feature and create a social network within the app, where users can add friends, join community forums and essentially — share and engage critically with each other.
Thank you for reading my case study — I hope you enjoyed reading it! If you have any feedback on it, please let me know. I would love to hear your opinion, as well as any constructive feedback you might have on how I can improve.
