Week 10: Evaluative Research

Project update for April 5th–11th

This week, our team began the evaluative stage of our research. After receiving feedback on our generative research, we decided to pause for a moment to reflect our most recent insights with those gleaned through our interviews in early March. This helped ground our current thinking in a holistic frame.

Screenshot of concept development in Miro

PROCESS

We received guidance from our research methods professors (Hajira and Sofia) for how we might conduct “speed dating” type evaluations through electronic survey. This approach offers a few advantages:

• Asynchronous participation
• Psychological safety
• Transportable text

The primary challenge to this approach is a secondary development, in the form of creating an interactive experience. Hajira and Sofia recommended the electronic survey platform, TypeForm. This platform allows for logic-driven paths, giving users a “choose your own adventure” style of navigation and a variety of inputs. After evaluating its abilities we were nearly sold, but the price for unlocking these features was surprisingly high at $40 per month.

Screenshot of Typeform sample survey (modified)

We began to seek alternatives and found the free version of Tripetto offered these same features. We had a choice before us as a team: choose a platform that we knew and understood, and pay $40 to use it for a couple weeks, or choose a free platform that will require additional learning. “Free” is hard to beat, but we had to consider the possibility that a paid feature might become too important to work around. We might end up paying either way, but lose time in the process.

Tripetto survey prototype

Despite this risk, we opted for the free option.

Having chosen a platform, we began prototyping the user experience. We anticipated that it would take some time to learn to use the platform while also designing and iterating meaningful experiences that could provide our team with useful feedback from real educators. Kicking the proverbial tires of Typeform gave us a sense of scale for this project.

Screenshot of proof-of-concept created with Tripetto

Next steps:

• Survey outline
• Concept descriptions
• Concept sketches
• Identify online communities (e.g., Facebook, Reddit, etc.) of educators
• Survey finalization and launch
• Concept refinement and prototyping