Ideation: From Ideas to Learning Experience Map
Authors: Yu Zhao, with AnnaB, GyuEun Park and Miaojun Xu
Where are we in the design process?
We are now moving to the ideation part of the design process.
Ideating using storyboards
We generated 20 ideas that tackle the issue of motivation from various perspectives: documentation, breakthrough, communicating importance, providing engaging experiences and many more.
For instance, Rubber Duck Debugging takes a physical format. Students engage with the “rubber duck” when they encounter difficulties in their projects. We are hoping that this can help students clear their thoughts when they stuck at some point, and document the moment of learning when they have a breakthrough.
Journey map, on the other hand, takes a digital format and focuses on autonomy granting in making a reflection-based portfolio. Students are able to customize and structure each component (representing each step) in a journey map.
Speed-dating with stakeholders helps us dig deeper into the stakeholders’ needs and identify the most promising ideas
Goal: The goal of the speed-dating session was to understand stakeholders’ impression and acceptance toward our ideas. It can also help us identify the most promising ideas.
Method Selected: Speed-dating is a method where the design researcher presents various ideas to stakeholders and ask them to comment on each idea. It is used as a method to find ideas of promises and of perits.
Participants: One speed-dating session was conducted with the principle of KAS and another with two students.
Findings and Design Implications:
We used an affinity diagram technique to help us analyze results.
- From the affinity diagram, four mid-level design principles emerged: free but organized, enjoyable, takes off the pressure and combining socio-emotional development with academic development.
- Another category from the affinity diagram was the “I don’t want” section, it helps us define the boundary of our design. For instance, students do not want teachers to “hover over” to take their pictures, do not want to be disturbed while they are making, and do not want mandatory presentation etc.
- From the speed-dating session, we also saw several most promising ideas that includes journey map, emoji, progress bar, rubber duck debugging and stakeholder reflections.
Synthesis Artifacts:
Refining Storyboards based on stakeholder feedback
We created two storyboards both incorporate key design insights from affinity diagram.
The first storyboard “visual” features three of our previous storyboards (journey map, emoji and progress bar). It answers to our HMW statement by incorporating fun moments into reflection and by scaffolding.
The second storyboard “talking aloud” features two of our previous storyboards (rubber duck debugging and stakeholder reflections). It answers to our HMW statement by incorporating talking to reflect and by passing on the importance of reflecting.
Creating learning experience map to further conceptualize and communicate the future of reflection
We decided to focus on the “visual” solution as it more directly addresses the motivation issue. Next, we created a learning experience map which is a hybrid of a service blueprint and a customer journey map to help us further envision the reflection process of future.
Several iterations of the learning experience map were carried out to further develop our ideas.
We digitalized the experience map and took it to the design critique session. It is looking good, but wait —
We received many insightful feedbacks in term of communication design, context in use and learning outcomes.
We iterated on the design of learner experience map, the feedback from critique helps us design a more integrated tool and present it in a more visually-appealing way.
What’s next for Team EureKAS?
Moving on to the ideation phase, the next step would be to design, test and iterate on prototypes!
