Project I Retrospective: an App to Benefit Education

For my initial assignment at General Assembly I was given the task of designing an app for a phone to benefit Education. I did not have an initial idea or problem to address so began my process with research hoping that the information gathered from my (potentials) users would reveal one to me. I began my research by creating an Empathy Map from the perspective of someone using their phone for educational purposes to identify my potential users and what questions I may ask during my User Interviews.

I: Empathy Map

II. Review Topics & Creating Interview Questions

This did prove helpful and gave me a few Research Topics to explore such as: Educational Needs, Technology Use, and Outside Life (routine outside of class).

This inspired some of my more fruitful questions asked during my interviews such as:

• What difficulties/frustrations did you encounter while studying _______?
• What role if any did technology play in your education?
• What class work if any did you need to complete outside of class?
• What problems if any did you encounter using your phone rather than computer or books for classwork?
• How much time did you spend yesterday travelling/commuting during the course of the day?

III. The User Interviews

I questioned four acquaintances (three female, one male) for my User Interviews, ranging in age from 29–33. I chose to speak with users outside of GA to get a wider variety of student experiences and responses.

IV. Affinity Map

Despite the variety of study areas: French, Arabic, Oil Painting Technique: 3/3 users interviewed noted Technological Shortcomings (mainly unsupported websites, lack of current information, or no lecture content at all) or Lack of Time as their two biggest frustrations. Because of timing conflicts classes were occasionally missed, and not enough time spent on work/study as they would like.

V. Problem Statement & Hypothesis

I chose to try and address these two frustrations as one problem: Students need a method of getting easy and efficient mobile access to their educational material so they can take advantage of all free opportunities to study during the course of a busy day.

My goal was to create a product, in this case a phone app, for students that would address these issues by being simple and easy to use while on the go, allowing users to watch or listen to lectures uploaded by an instructor, and to offer an option to save content offline for use in situations without wifi or data service (2/3 users stated the issue that they used their phone to study generally when on subways and planes but have no access to the all web based content). Essentially with this app students would have access to their syllabus and lectures enabling to study anywhere and anytime they please (3/3 users stated that they spent 2 or more hours in transit daily and 2/3 would prefer to spend that time studying).

VI. Storyboard

I chose to sketch a storyboard depicting someone trying to read lecture notes on their phone while on the subway and the problems one may encounter: Trying to Read in a Crowded Space, Getting Pushed by Other Straphangers, Taking Time to Find Your Place Again, and Not Having Time to Get Through As Much As You Liked, only to Try to Do It All Over Again On Your Way Home.

VII. Iteration I

Prior to iteration I spent some time looking to see if I could find an app that offered similar features to what I wanted mine to have and after not finding something similar progressed on to my (very) lo-fi sketch for my first iteration, strictly to put down some of my own thoughts onto paper.

From here I moved on to plotting out the user flows that most (student) users would use and sketched them into new lo-fi sketches.

Buttons and layouts were designed to be large in order to accommodate single handed use, as was common for mobile users.

Walking Through the Apps Main Function: Home Page to Playback

Secondary Function: Adding New Courses

I imagine that schools would need to protect their intellectual property (their course Lectures) by using a key similar to that generated for online software such as Adobe Creative Suite.

VIII. User Testing

Iteration I of my app was tested at GA on 4 of my classmates falling into the same category as the users interviewed: late 20’s to early 30’s urban dwelling students.

They were asked to to imagine they were on the train looking to review a French class lecture from the 3/28 saved in their app. After concluding that part they were asked to perform the separate task of adding their new cooking course to the portfolio of courses they follow on their app. They were told to they would have been giving the info needed to do so by their lecturer (lecturer’s last name and a course key).

Below is a diagram pointing out the areas where they got stuck or found flaws with:

IX. Iteration II

Armed with feedback from my users I was ready to make improvements to make the sites functions and buttons more straightforward, which led to the following changes noted in the diagram below.

X. Marvel Link to Prototype Named: Lecturn

Link: https://marvelapp.com/2e18fd1

XI. Continuing Forward

In the short term the next step would certainly be to conduct another round of user testing to produce a 3rd iteration of the student porthole.

Long term I would look to conduct the very same kind of research in order to develop the user flow for the lecturer’s porthole.

Granular/UI focuses may include the addition of course syllabi and calendars.

Essentially what the app could be is a web based repository for collections of all course lectures and other supplemental files in Print, Audio or Video, saved in an easy to use blog format and available to students online or for download. Rather than individual schools or programs attempting to maintain their own sites lecturers can maintain their own collections of lectures on a site that should be no difficult to maintain than a Tumblr page. No matter what school you’re attending reviewing all your lectures could be as accessible as logging into Lecturn and pushing play.