ProblemSolutionResearchDefineIdeateDesignTestReflection

“Impact Student Data Dashboard”

GoalGo is a one-stop goal management web-based platform that helps new students at City of Bridges High School direct and manage learning goals based on their underlying interests, curiosities, and values in the competency-based education system

My Role
As a UX designer, I contributed to the overall design process, including brainstorming viable ideas, drawing storyboards, user flows, wireframes, UI design, and iterations from Low-fi, Mid-fi, to High-fi prototyping.

Additionally, I conducted user research, facilitated user interviews and usability testings, and contributed to synthesizing research findings to define product scoping.
Team
Sean Wang, Yinru Sun, Claire Yoon
Timeline
Sep. - Nov. 2021
(Course Project)

Design Process

Problem Discovery

Fresh students in the City of Bridge High School can't set goals fitting their interests & passions in the competency-based education system.

Our Solution - Goalgo

An interactive goal-setting and management tool

Background Research

Focus on the ‘onboarding’ process in the Competency-Based Education (CBE) system providing personalized learning opportunities.

We started the research by understanding the innovative education system. We want to discover the challenges for students from diverse backgrounds to get into this community and envision a more smooth and enjoyable onboarding experience for students and teachers in the City of Bridge High School (CoBHS).

Contextual Inquiry

Interviewed 4 stakeholders and identified their struggles with the existing in-person guidance and paper-based documentation.

We conducted the contextual inquiry with the school principal, teacher, and 2 fresh-year students to explore the main onboarding activities. We also analyzed the artifacts collected, including school social media posts, school Handbook, and school documents, to enrich the understanding of school value and onboarding activities.

Pain Points

More than existing onboarding activities are needed to support students adapting to the competency-based education system.

We built the onboarding collaboration model by synthesizing the research data and found four key pain points.

Design Opportunities

Translate the pain points into three design opportunities

The needs of students and teachers informed three main HMW questions.

Storyboards

Select 10 storyboards and describe the idea in context

We designed and sketched 16 ideas based on the HMW statements. By integrating and organizing, we selected 10 storyboards and used the speed dating method to test for students and teachers.

Speeddating

Encourage 20+ students and 5 teachers to test storyboards to see how they would interact with the ideas

We presented storyboards to 5 mixed groups of students and teachers, respectively, who ranked the storyboards by how useful they perceived them to be and wrote down their thoughts on the sticky notes. Then, we consolidated their feedback and organized and visualized the difference between teachers' and students' preferences using the coordinated map.

We narrowed down and reframed our design concepts as the ‘Goal-setting Kit’ based on the results of the coordinate map.

Learning Experience Map

Focus on the 2 parts of the goal-setting process that students find most challenging

We reviewed the data and used the learning experience map to dig into the goal-setting journey. We found that the two main challenges students faced were coming up with goals and planning the pathway with proper management. We broke them into five goal-setting stages and focused on goal definition and tracking process. The third layer narrowed down our design scope and zoomed into the part students struggle with most to start our design concept.

Design Solution Overview

Empower students’ goal-setting through long-term self-exploration and step-by-step scaffolding

Considering the pain points and users' needs we found before, we want to build a digital goal-setting tool to help students gradually find their interests and goal and finally direct them to their own way of goals with the help of teachers.

User Flow

Distribute each step of goal-setting into pages

We decomposed the goal-setting into a linear, unskippable navigation process and mapped the flows into the interface pages, which led to our product structure and page-level interaction design.

Low-fi Prototype

Design the Low-fi Prototype including interactions and basic information architecture

Use the progress bar on the top of the interface to help students to master the whole picture and more easily digest and engage in each part of the goal-setting.

The Final Product

Three-step Goal-setting with the management center

Demo Video

User Feedback

Have the public presentation and receive feedback from students, teachers, and the headmaster

Project Takeaways

Think from students' and teachers' perspectives for the educational product through understanding users in context.

The project focused on user research and narrowed down users' needs. We have walked through a solid research process, including contextual inquiry, user profile analysis, synthesis model, and learning experience map to understand the users, stakeholders, and their interrelationships within the system. A significant difference between educational and other products is that we need to consider both students' and teachers' perspectives as UX designers. The user research insights serve as important cornerstones for us to revisit anytime and align the direction of our concept development with users' needs and the systemic framework.