experience + brand designer
carol-anne ryce-paul
LEMMA, INC. - The Client - Ed-Tech Mini-Hackathon
Lemma, Inc., a cloud-based content creation, learning, and assessment platform for the teaching of Mathematics. https://www.lem.ma
Prompt: Improve existing design as students are having a hard time interacting with the current site
Feature: Lessons and assignments
Audience: Students - to learn math; Teachers - to teach math;
Administrators - evaluate both students and teachers
Challenge for the Mini Hackathon: Design an effective and intuitive way for students to learn by starting, going over and completing a lesson
Expected Output / Deliverables: Wireframe, clickable prototype
My Role: Research, Facilitation, Presentation
Team: Consisted of five ux design participants randomly chosen
USER STORY
Personal Summary
Alana is an extroverted and social high school algebra student
Needs/Behaviors
Ability to ask questions about assignments
Understand how to navigate through new assignments, including lessons, worksheets, and videos
May not complete assignments in sequence or at one sitting
Demographics
15 years old, Sophomore
Female
High School Algebra Student
Location: Urban (Queens)
Pain Points
Missing parts of assignments
Not engaged
HOW MIGHT WE…
create a digital classroom environment where the subject is curated according to the student’s learning experience?
Challenge/Insights/Goal:
Initially, the biggest challenges were:
Navigating easily according to the student’s curiosity and ability to complete the classroom contents in a non-linear way
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Students either unable to or too frustrated or bored to finish their assignments and move onto the next lesson
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Students get confused by the navigation through their lessons
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Students would benefit from all of the information being visibly accessible all the time
Success is…
The ability to show navigation between the student's chosen lesson, and the entire classroom learning environment in one clickable prototype
INITIAL WHITEBOARD SKETCH
INSIGHTS
These were the insights we used to determine how we progressed.
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Students getting confused navigating through their lessons
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The students didn't finish their assignments and/or move onto another lesson
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Students would need all relevant information to be easily accessible
RESEARCH
The competitive analysis was done on other education websites such as Coursera, Udacity, and Khan Academy
We wanted to know how these online classrooms kept their student simultaneously focused on the task of completing the lesson and having the entire program readily available
We broke down the student's task:
Go to your lesson and complete all of the requirements of the assignment from your teacher
WIREFRAME SKETCHES
WIREFRAME PROTOTYPE
PROTOTYPE ANALYSIS
During the team's very short testing phase, we learned that the design for the student's user flow should be very simple to understand and very simple to move from one area to another.
We learned that this website will be an ongoing process that needs to be revisited and refined as we collect user feedback.
NEXT STEPS - RECOMMENDATIONS
Based on our experience and the ongoing evolution of the product we recommend the following:
To understand the overall information architecture of this learning site, the team may need another round of broad qualitative research.
While we looked at what students will do about a particular lesson or type of lesson on the site, we may need to know what drives them to continue and complete a lesson vs lesson abandonment.
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The team will need to gauge the effectiveness of this design by testing with the students who will use this site
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We need to test different ways of keeping the student user on the site so that they complete the lesson. Perhaps add more engaging content to capture the student's interest
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Next round of usability testing should be done as a hi-fi prototype with specific lessons specific to the students