Prototyping with Middle Schoolers

Revealing the Benefits of Contextual Inquiry

In 2011 the Chicago History Museum opened their American history exhibition titled Facing Freedom. Following the opening, the education department was tasked with creating a classroom experience using themes and materials from the exhibition. My role was to keep the experience user-centric, provide direction to the prototype developers, and evaluate the prototype’s effectiveness.

The experience was targeted to middle-and-high school teachers and students. Our design question was how might we use technology to engage middle-and-high school students with American history in the classroom? We spent several months working with Chicago area teachers to shape our idea into a product. We addressed the teacher and student needs by creating a web application prototype. The prototype consisted of eight rare, relatable, and powerful American stories and accompanied them with an interpretation platform titled My Freedom Collection.

Testing the Prototype

Our team was running very lean, and we had a minimal budget–to put it lightly. In order to stay within budget we evaluated the prototype’s effectiveness on our own.

It was necessary to observe teachers and students using the prototype in their natural environment. At the time my usability research experience was limited to one adult user at a time in a lab, museum gallery, or office setting. Contextual research in multiple classrooms with teachers and students was new, exciting, and intimidating territory.

I won’t go into much detail, but I designed the test to function like a typical classroom assignment followed by a quick survey. Teachers presented the prototype like any other class material then asked their students to perform a function and submit their work.

We tested with five teachers and their students at a diverse mix of private, catholic, and public schools located in Chicago. The setting was as natural as possible. The location was at the user’s school, the time was their regular class time, and the role of facilitator was given to the teacher. The only artificial element was our team, the observers. The educators on my team were active observers, and I was the passive observer.

The Facilitator–introduced the team and test, managed the flow and time, and provided unbiased guidance to the students as a group.

Active observers–worked with one individual student throughout a test instance, noted friction points experienced by the student, and recorded any exposed interference between the prototype and its purpose.

Passive observer–I looked for signals and interaction patterns at a higher level, focusing on the physical space, opportunities, limitations, body language, behavior, and interactions between teachers and students.

What We Learned

Overall the test assured us that the prototype was on the right track. Most students were engaged, the stories resonated with them, they understood the interpretation assignment, and were able to complete it with little help. The teachers reinforced our findings and advocated for the web application.

As with a typical usability test, we caught bugs, noted grammatical errors, found ways to simplify the task flow, and documented opportunities to improve the user experience. However, unlike a typical usability test, the contextual inquiry process exposed important environmental factors that revealed a greater challenge. A challenge which would have remained invisible in a usability lab.

We learned that some teachers faced limited access to technology, as well as unexpected technological constraints—such as archaic computers, outdated web browsers, slow internet connections, and lack of dedicated IT staff. Using products like the ours would require greater efforts on behalf of the teacher, school, and school system. Discovering these limitations increased our empathy for our users, and gave us the ability to intelligently design the next phase of the Facing Freedom classroom experience.

Contextual inquiry is a powerful research method. Unfortunately, solid research and design is not enough for a product to succeed. Although Facing Freedom is accessible to teachers and students, we were never able to iterate and evolve it after it’s initial launch. This is why I celebrate Facing Freedom as one of my greatest failures.

Read Celebrate Your Failures, my perspective on failing.

Shout out to Andy Budd and James Box from Clearleft. Your feedback made a huge impact, thanks.