K-12 Education Mobile App
IBM Watson for Education
Due to confidentiality, what follows is a high level overview of my process as the design researcher on a team with five product designers for an IBM mobile experience for K-12 Education.
“I know some uber moms who would eat this up. They would use it daily.” — Parent during user testing with our scenarios and wireframes
My Role as Design Researcher
I led the team’s comprehensive research into education. In addition to hustling interviews with 35 people in five weeks, I helped the team create six personas, two as-is and to-be scenarios, and I provided the roadmap and recommendations for the future of this experience.
By interviewing and collaborating with IBM product managers, product leads, vice presidents, design leads, designers, researchers, and developers as well as sponsor users and people outside of IBM in our target user groups, I was able to gain a significant level of domain expertise K-12 Education. I have stronger insights into how to quickly learn about a new domain and use that knowledge to help teams move forward.
“One thing I thought really shows you understand the space and how transformational this could be was calling out the need to make it accessible [to families of all economic status] and not widen that gap. Thinking about the social implications of it is really phenomenal. You really demonstrated all the implications that could go into this.” — IBM Design Lead
Moving the Team Forward
I guided my teammates who had done minimal UX research previously in ways to conduct user interviews. I led the team in compiling user interview guides for teachers, school administrators, parents, students, and school counselors which helped us ask a consistent set of questions. This led to valuable interviews with 35 people in six weeks. The result was a holistic view of problems and opportunities in K-12 schools across the country.
“It’s so clear how thorough you’ve been with your research because you’re investigating all these different audiences. You thought big picture and interviewed a ton of people. 35 people? Are you kidding? In six weeks! That’s insane. And you interviewed a wide range of people too.” —IBM Designer
Result
Through continuously reaching out to our stakeholders, who were distributed across the country and time zones, I helped the designers get stakeholder buy-in to narrow the scope of this experience to K-12. It had originally spanned the entire education spectrum of pre-Kindergarten to college and beyond. In the end, our findings were a crucial stake in the ground for the IBM Watson for Education team.
“You’ve told us where we should go with this, and I believe it’s very compelling and so we will go there.
“I can look at your to-be scenario, and I can already envision a number of ways we can take that for both B2B and B2C, and it gives us a platform to have those discussions.” — IBM Product Director
