I started off my process by exploring different problems that exist within virtual education. I focused on problems that affected students as those were the main sources of contact I had access to.
New learners registered for online courses on the platform Coursera in 2021, showing a growing need for better virtual education.
Of undergraduate students say low motivation is their biggest challenge to virtual learning.
Of students are able to successfully complete large-scale online courses; an alarmingly low completion rate.
From this secondary research, I drafted a hypothesis that I could validate or refute through user interviews with students that had experience with virtual education.
Students are not motivated while learning online because they lack peer-to-peer interaction, experience distractions at home, and lack interactive learning methods.
After conducting secondary research, I needed first hand accounts from students on the problems they face during virtual education.
During this stage, I took the role of helping draft the interview script, obtaining consent forms, and conducting interviews for two participants. Participants were recruited from personal networks due to time and availability constraints.
Overview
To understand why students find difficulties with virtual courses, I conducted decontextualized user interviews through video calls. The interviews were between 30 to 45 minutes with the main focus being to ask both general and specific questions about individuals' experiences with virtual education. Notes were taken to record important information and insights gathered from the participants.
Inclusion Criteria
Interview participants were undergraduate, graduate, or professional students (18-25 years old) and screened based on if they had previously studied through virtual education for more than 1 month.
Some Key Questions
• How did you find the workload in online classes compared to in-person?
• Tell me about a time you overcame challenges to online learning.
• Describe a virtual class that you do not think worked well and what were some reasons for that?
The next step was to take all the interview insights and start drawing themes that capture the most pertinent issues students face. This analysis involved an affinity map that helped deduce which theme was most important based on frequency of mentions within and across participants.
From these findings, I focused on 3 themes that capture the current experience of virtual students. And then narrowed down on educator support as it was also backed up by secondary research.
Peer Interaction
Online education makes it harder to interact with peers and relies on them as a source of support. This makes the online experience feel isolating and causes students to burn out faster.
Educator Support
Educators fail to provide support to students in online environments because it is harder to connect with them. This negatively impacts students’ ability to seek help during and after class.
Self-Regulation
Online education requires a lot more self-regulation but your ability to hold yourself accountable diminishes when there is no one physically there to keep you on track.
From the theme of educator support, I created the following how might we statement to empathize with users and start ideating on solutions.
"How might we help undergraduate students connect with their educators in order to support learning in and out of class?"
To further support ideation, a persona was useful in helping understand the specific pain points, goals, motivation, and behaviours associated with the target user of my solution.
An experience map helped understand the user's As-Is journey when navigating virtual education and helps pinpoint main areas to improve their experience.
I focused on the area of attending class as this was the point frustrations started. The opportunity here focuses on helping teachers navigate in class questions.
I used a task flow to outline the user's journey through a proposed app. The task flow outlines each of the screens in the app as locations with user actions to show interactivity between the screens.
The task flow outlines key user needs such as social interaction, educator moderation, and keeping record of posts, highlighting key user pain points.
My app's branding needed to seem reliable and calm to help bring student's ease during stressful lessons and ensure that are getting the right answers. For this reason I lead with a monochromatic teal colour scheme with rounded corners to provide that sense of reliability and calmness.
For my app's typography, I used Open Sans for the following benefits:
This entire project has been invaluable to my discovery of the UX process. It started off with a lot of uncertainty and some doubt in my abilities, but despite the hours of trial and error, I was able to create something I could be proud of.
One thing this project taught me is the importance of getting constant feedback. With so many steps and the overall complexity of the project, it is easy to lose focus and keep going without refining your work. This is especially true with time constraints and being eager to get to the next step. By getting feedback from other educators, peers, and friends, I was able to continuously look at my project with a fresh lens.
Future Directions
• Conduct further user research and discover more opportunities to help aid the current problem space
• Expand to other platforms where the app can be made more accessible and interactive with other software
• Do more user testing on the current solution to find any outstanding issues that can be improved for the app
User Research
User Testing
UI Design
Collaboration
Design Thinking
Covo
An app for language learners to connect so they can practice having conversations.
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