With the COVID-19 hit all over the world, the growing need for online classes became prevalent. However, the online classroom is new to many students, families, and instructors. There is not a lack of resources available digitally to aid education or help students learn valuable life skills, however, there is a lack of knowledge, use, and sharing of them.
To understand the pain points faced by students and professors to collaborate and learn, the approach followed was the traditional design thinking process including research, define, ideation, prototype, and test.
Interview Process:
Interviews consisted of zoom meetings that lasted between 20 minutes to an hour and a half. Participants for this study included high school students, parents, and teachers. Due to a large number of COVID-19 cases, we could conduct only two in-person interviews. The think-aloud research method was used to observe the interaction of students with the existing educational apps.
TOPICS DISCUSSED IN THE INTERVIEWS:
Affinity Diagram
Due to the team's inability to meet in person and collaborate to analyze data, we decided to work on Figma to create the Affinity Map. The first step was to create post-it notes from the responses of participants, separating them by questions. After creating the post-it notes made from responses, we then combed through them to detect patterns or themes to generate useful insights from our data and came up with two main pain points that required the most attention:
After the whole research process based on the similarities of goals and behavioral patterns through contextual inquiry, we were able to describe the entire user base of Pixel Paper into two personas ( student, and professor)and one anti-persona (Grandparents). These personas help to create a better picture of the target users which eventually leads to a better understanding.
Primary Persona → Students
The primary user of Pixel Paper are students that struggle with materials and collaboration with friends and professors. The system will provide them chat feature and all materials needed in a single platform.
Persona → Professors
Another common category is Professors. The system will help in adding materials and making them important announcements.
After designing the personas, we started working on the user flows and wireframes. By this time we had a concrete idea about who the user was, what the user needed and what were the exact pain points for the user in the existing online ordering process. All of this information informed our subsequent design process which is why we decided to have research first and then start off with designing the application
The Lo-Fi prototypes are focused on the student’s perspective; however, the prototype still focuses on the overall concerns that arose during the interviews. This speaks to the issues that were addressed by the teachers as well.
SKETCHES FOR LO-FI PROTOTYPE:
The Hi-Fi prototypes were created from the students' perspective. We created both Desktop and mobile versions for Pixel Paper. Through this application, we removed a few of the main concerns of students and teachers -
A style guide was created before beginning the High Fidelity designs to ensure consistency in the design. A style guide helps a lot in maintaining a consistent design style for fonts and colors especially when working in a team.
