Coursera: StatsApp
This post is part of Interaction Design Capstone Project, the 10th and last course of a specialization offered by Coursera.
The journey started off fine, but somewhere along the way, it became a grueling march to this point. It’s always amazing how a simple idea can turn into a complicated mess when people are introduced into the equation. That’s my biggest take away from Human Interaction Design: designing for people is extremely challenging. It’s so easy to identify cases of “bad” design, but it’s 100 times more difficult to refine and refine and refine into a well-designed product.
How I got too this point.
It all started with a need and some inspiration. The need: streamlined, efficient, consistent, method of learning basic statistics. Users I identified expressed frustration with current teaching methods in Introductory Statistics classes. They found the content dry, complicated, and frustrating.
The inspiration also came from the users. When asked what web sites/applications they found to be especially interesting, streamlined, and enjoyable, they mentioned SparkNotes and the Daily Skimm. These two sites became the inspiration behind StatsApp.
With an idea in mind, the next step was sketching out a prototype. I examined the main features of the two sources of inspiration and came up with these design principles: simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. Simple colors, simple layouts, simple functions, simple explanations, etc, etc etc. The first paper prototype looked like this.
Then came the refinement. As already discussed, putting an idea in front of real, live, humans is enlightening. Humans quickly expose all the tiny flaws and inconsistencies in design.
Round and round we went, iteration upon iteration, until we landed at what you see today. And there are still many more iterations to get through!
What you see today is this: 1) a simple, vertical layout. Scroll up and down; that’s it! 2) Simple functionality — each slideshow only has two buttons: backwards and forwards. The third button is the navigation button. This navigation screen copies other navigation buttons in order to facilitate understanding. 3) Simple color scheme: I think there are just four colors in the whole site: red, white, grey, and black.
The use case.
You’re a student in an Introductory Statistics class at an American university. You’re studying to become a nurse and are required to take this class; otherwise, there’s no way you’d be here.
You attend class, read the textbook, and talk with the teacher- it still seems confusing. You’re not the only one who feels this way: everyone is frustrated. It just takes so long to cut through the dense material.
The solution: StatsApp. StatsApp skips all the extraneous information. It’s simple to use — it doesn’t require a users manual. You an pull out your mobile, go to StatsApp, find the topic you need, and start learning. So simple.