Summer Class in Session
Goal Recap and Fresh Findings
If you recall from our last post, our design solution is guided by two main goals derived from what we learned from the spring prototype. These goals are helping students learn about themselves and helping them explore and choose courses.
In the last sprint, we focused on the first goal: helping students learn about themselves. We came out of prototype testing with students with two very promising ideas: our avatar creator and our vision board activity. Students found them engaging and meaningful, and we learned that visualization seems to be the key to designing these types of experiences for students. Both activities captured students’ interest and provided them with a tangible way to reflect on their identities and ambitions.
Setting Direction
Through an impact-effort matrix, we determined that our most strategic next steps involved tackling our biggest open question: how we might help students explore and select courses. Addressing this question will allow us to bridge our two main goals, providing a comprehensive solution that supports both self-discovery and course selection.
By prioritizing course selection at this stage, we ensure that our efforts align with our long-term vision of creating a holistic experience for students that we will continue to work towards in the next few sprints.
Ideation and Key Questions
Since we are focusing on how to inspire course exploration in this round of design prototyping, we needed to align with some of the key questions we had about this specific area of the problem space. What information hierarchy is the most intuitive and helpful for finding specific classes and new ones? Who or what resources do students trust the most to guide them in their decisions? What visualizations accurately depict a student’s thought and decision process when searching for classes?
During our spring semester, we presented a prototype that had a swipe-to-match mechanism to help students explore classes. The hypothesis was that if students only saw classes one-at-a-time, they would be less biased about disregarding certain classes. However, for the summer, we want to confirm if this is actually the best solution for our problem space. We brainstormed various ideas asynchronously through activities like Crazy 8’s. We walked each other through our ideas and dot-voted on the most viable ones. From this brainstorming activity, we got to explore our individual thoughts and then come back together to find patterns in our ideas and how they might connect with each other.
Some of our key themes were multimodal interactive experiences like augmented and virtual reality. We also considered information visualization through map or tree diagrams and better integration of the community to inspire class exploration.
The Prototypes
After a lively ideation session, we narrowed down our 20+ ideas into four prototypes to explore this sprint. They each tackle course exploration in a different way, with some more focused on information architecture and others on an immersive experience.
It’s more fitting to introduce the Interactive Map and the Skill Web together since they both consider how to visualize and organize course information, and how classes may connect with skills and real-world applications. The only difference is the information architecture: the Interactive Map takes inspiration from clustering in statistics, whereas the Skill Web is more hierarchical. We will explore which visualization makes the most sense in user testing.
The Expert Network enables students to chat with industry professionals who may or may not be alumni, and they will recommend classes alongside the help of an AI. Students can find experts who align with their goals and interests, making the course selection process much more informative.
The AR Course Tour takes advantage of the environment at South Fayette High School, where students can enter classrooms and interact with information and artifacts from the course in that classroom. We hypothesize that students will enjoy the hands-on experience and be more engaged in learning new information about courses when they can explore spatially.
Less is More: Testing Concepts
We decided to reduce three of our prototypes a bit for testing; the AR Course Tour, the hierarchical Skill Web, and the Interactive Map were all doing more than we technically needed (or wanted) them to in order to test the key assumptions backing them.
For the AR Course Tour, we came to the conclusion that while having the prototype lay out the tool and its functions, we might benefit from more open conceptual testing of this idea. By trying a significantly simplified version of the prototype, we figured we could test student exploration with the idea of AR and learn what sorts of things they would expect (or want) to see and interact with. We reduced a version of this prototype to an iPad with an open camera app, telling student participants to take pictures of things they would want to interact with in an AR experience as they wander the school.
As mentioned above, we realized that the Skill Web and Interactive Map were very similar concepts, with information architecture and layout dividing them. So, what could we provide students with to see what makes the most sense to them? The answer we came to was card sorting, an old UX testing classic!
Not only taking note of the categories students put cards (containing class descriptions) in but also taking note of how they structure their sorting and the relationships they draw between classes is key in this prototype revamp. Another thing that we planned to track was what questions students asked in the process. If there was any specific information students wanted to know about classes in order to make sorting decisions on them, we might find that information would be useful to include in any future prototype’s class listings.
With these upgraded prototypes in hand, we now head once more into the school to test!
Xoxo,
Team South Fayette
This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.
