Dashboard Design
OVERVIEW
The use of technology in a classroom can be distracting for students. Our team focuses specifically on solving the issue of students getting distracted and not paying attention while other students in the class are presenting.
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To solve this problem our team designed a dashboard application for both students and the instructor to help limit the number of distractions for students and increase student engagement.
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ROLE​
UX Researcher
Prototyping & Testing
UI Designer
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DURATION​
2 weeks
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Problem​
During a student presentation, the student listeners tend to get distracted by their open laptops and not give constructive feedback or pay attention to the student presenters. This in turn impacts the presenting team as they will not receive the feedback they desire from their presentation. The instructor is then forced to spend less time giving feedback or focusing on the presenting team and more time trying to get the student listeners to give active feedback and engage. For instructors this can be difficult as they do not always have control over what each student is doing or not doing on their laptops during a student presentation.
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Understanding User Needs
EMPATHY MAPS
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Given three personas (one of a professor, student listener, and student presenter), our group analyzed and created an empathy map for each persona. We primarily looked at what each persona does, their goals, how they felt about their situation, what influences them, and the primary pain points
Instructer: Professor Rodriguez
Persona Story:
Professor Rodriguez has been teaching Introduction to Game Design for five years. In her class, students create games and iterate them based on feedback from the instructor and peers. She has noticed that in the past, many students check Facebook or go to sleep during student presentations, instead of giving feedback to their peers. She wants listeners to give high-quality feedback that helps the presenting design team, and to make high-quality feedback given by other listeners more visible. She also wants to know if students get distracted or stop providing feedback. Finally, she wants to be able to capture her own feedback during the presentation, over and above what she could tell the team verbally during post-presentation Q&A.
Student Presenter: Joanna Blaine
Persona Story:
Joanna is a student in the Introduction to Game Design class. She is an engineering major who is taking this course as a fun elective, because she used to love making card games for her two younger sisters. She will be presenting her game to the class, along with the rest of her design team. She wants to get helpful feedback from the rest of the class about how to improve her game in the next two weeks. She also wants to be prepared to argue her points if she and the rest of her team disagree about the feedback they received.
Student Listener: Frank Tan
Persona Story:
Frank is a student in the Introduction to Game Design class. He is an art major who wants to work in the game industry. He wants to help his peers make better games, but he sometimes gets social media notifications during class and can be distracted if he has nothing to do. He has a lot of helpful things to say about game art, but has much less feedback to offer about technology and system design.
After completing the empathy maps, we then filled in the needs analysis diagram to further understand the different/similar needs of our user/stakeholders. This also allowed us to better see not only the said needs but also potential pain points all in one place.
Brainstorming
In our first sketch, we wanted to create something that was both interactive and unique. The bubbles on the student dashboard help visualize similarities in the data and feedback given thus far for the presenting group. The student can tag their feedback so that all feedback is organized by topic. The professor’s dashboard will contain statistics and graphics that help them keep track of their student's progress in terms of engagement and the feedback they give.
For the second sketch, the professor’s dashboard allows the teacher to view the participation/ engagement levels of each of the students. Their dashboard helps the teacher know the type of comments that are being upvoted; the teacher can emphasize comments that they think are good. With the student’s dashboard, students can view their classmates’ feedback with the upvoted comments at the top. They will also have access to the presenting teams’ questions so that they can ensure that their feedback helps answer the guiding questions.
Solution
STUDENT DASHBOARD
Personalized screen for each student that would say “Hi [their name].” We took our inspiration from typeform.com. Their template is clean, simple and popular with many people for providing good feedback. We also wanted to provide feedback to the user on how long their paragraph could be. On the right hand side of the frame, the student will be notified their professor’s notifications, which are sent to the whole class. There is also feedforward to the student with the arrow “<” that tells the user to slide it out to see more tools.
This is the second view of the student’s dashboard. We wanted to allow students access to seeing their peers comments that may be helpful in giving critique to the presenting team. To navigate to this second view, you would swipe to the right of your first view. This view shows the class’ comments organized by basic categories set by the AI system. Comments are ordered by in chronlogical order by the size of the circles surrounding the categorical circles. We also set up a timer so students wouldn’t spend their time only looking at the class’s comments while the presentation is happening.
PROFESSOR DASHBOARD
We wanted to give the professor a similar view to the students’ first view. However, instead of having questions to ask the professor, the professor gets a small textbox to notify the class of something important or a question to ponder. The professor can also see recent activity of what their students are doing. For example, a student commenting or student asking a question.
The professors will also be able to see the statistics of the class and what questions students might’ve submitted during the presentations. A miniature version of the bubble map seen on the student dashboard second page can be found on the right half of the page. Clicking view more will link to the same full screen version of the map.
This view for the professor would be metrics about their students. This would include the number of comments made so far for the current presentation, student engagement levels, and the comments that the professor has emphasized. Additionally, the professor can see the students’ comments sorted by category. This can help the professor know if students are paying attention to what the student speakers may need help on. Furthermore, they can also use it as a way to nudge the class to focus on another category for the presentation. They can also see a list of their student questions that have been asked to them.
STUDENT DASHBOARD - FIGMA PROTOTYPE
PROFESSOR DASHBOARD - FIGMA PROTOTYPE