MOODLE PARENT
Redesign/alternative version; online parents' portal
User research, prototyping, and user testing; team project.
Identifying user profiles and doing competitor research.
RESEARCH AND IDEATION
We had to first identify the target audience we were designing the product for. To start off, we identified the various groups of users that were active on the current Moodle website and their typical usage, personas, needs, and wants.
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We chose to focus on parents as we wanted to go for a more unconventional target audience, and we knew of learning platforms that also had a parents' section which allowed them to keep up with their children in school. We wanted to bring it to Moodle as it was not an existing feature.
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We researched other learning platforms with such a feature so that we could both gauge the competition in the market but also find out what their users used/needed most. On top of that, we wanted to find a niche for ourselves as our unique selling point.
HEURISTIC EVALUATION
As our task was to redesign the existing Moodle for our target audience, we had to find out what it was about the current platform that made it unfriendly to users.
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We went through a list of issues on a site and evaluated them against Nielsen's heuristics for user interface design, ranking them in order of severity. This helped us identify the more pressing problems we needed to address when redesigning our platform.
The heuristics scale (Nielsen's) used for the project.
Documentation used for our interviews.
USER INTERVIEWS
The next step was to interview groups of users that would be affected by our design - namely: students, teachers, and, of course, parents.
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We identified potential user goals for each group, as well as any assumptions we had about our users that could affect our design. We used this information as a stepping stone to structure our interview questions so we could understand our users better. We also tailored the interview questions to each user group so that we could find out information specific to them.
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Some of the information we deemed essential to find out more about included the user's prior experiences with using such a platform, their needs and wants, and their typical usage of the original Moodle platform (if applicable), to name a few.
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Each of us in the team took turns to fill the role of the interviewer, facilitator, and note-taker.
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After each interview, we summarized our key findings and tweaked our questions according to observations we made to better obtain the information we wanted from subsequent interviews.
PROTOTYPING
After knowing more about the features users were looking for in our platform, we got to prototyping it for user testing.
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From our interviews, we deduced that the best approach to take for this platform (according to our target audience's needs) was to create a mobile app. This was because the convenience of use and accessibility were identified to be important to our users.
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We used Figma as we could easily collaborate on it. As this was our initial prototype, we wanted to focus more on the functionality of the app rather than the visuals of it. However, visual hierarchy, Gestalt laws, branding, and other design considerations were still important things to take note of. The objective of this step was to create something that could be used for user testing.
An overview of the screens made for the prototype.
Documentation of our findings and analysis
USABILITY TESTING
We then brought our prototype to our end-users for testing. To make sure the users we had gathered were appropriate for our testing needs, we constructed brief user profiles for each of them to determine their suitability.
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We wanted to evaluate if the app met their needs and wants and if it was usable for them. We prepared a list of tasks for them to undertake on the app prototype and observed their usage of it through live testing sessions. Afterwards, we asked them more questions regarding their experience with our app to find out more about their thoughts and struggles (if any) with it, and ways in which it could be improved.
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To make the information gathered easier to refer to, we also compiled them into charts and graphs.
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Finally, we ran a Nielsen's heuristics evaluation against our own app to identify areas of weaknesses that could affect its overall user experience and functionality.
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At the end of this stage, we were ready to reiterate our prototype for another cycle of testing.
POST-MORTEM
In general, the project achieved its goals for user research - we successfully carried out all steps of the user-centric design process.
I would have liked more time for reiterating after user testing as it is an important part of the whole process, but we were unfortunately limited by the timeline of the project. It was also a pity that COVID limited our pool of playtesters as it was harder to contact many people outside of our immediate circles - we had to rely on contacts from those people to find playtesters that fit our personas.
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Our playtest process was constrained by COVID as well. Online playtests meant we could only observe what the playtesters were sharing with us on their screens and not their behaviour in real life. Because of this, the amount and kinds of information we could gather from the playtesters were limited.
However, I'm happy with the iterative nature of our interview process. Revising our questions after each interview based on their usefulness in getting us the information we were looking for allowed us to maximise the effectiveness of our interviews.
