Rhea Kulkarni

UMSI Capstone Project: Designing an online portal for teachers

My Role: Project Manager, Ideation, wire-framing, user testing, prototyping, visual/brand design, interaction design

Introduction

Backyard Brains is an Ann Arbor tech startup founded by University of Michigan alumni, Tim Marzullo and Greg Gage. Backyard Brains’ goal is to make learning neuroscience fun, accessible, and affordable for teachers and students of all levels. Their products can best be described as educational neuroscience tools, and these tools mimic real equipment used by neuroscientists in the field.

I had the opportunity to speak to the University of Michigan School of Information media team about this project. Check out the video below for an overview of our project.

Problem and Task

There was previously no support system for BYB users besides a static FAQ page, and a support number to call. Furthermore, BYB has a wealth of digital resources but they were poorly organized, difficult to find, and often too long and in depth for busy teachers to sift through. As such, these teachers often felt out of their depth and isolated in their use of these kits, thereby compromising their student’s learning experience.

Our team’s goal was to create a teacher portal on the existing Backyard Brains website for teachers to facilitate a smoother and more learnable on-boarding process when it comes to learning and using Backyard Brains products.

Methods

To address the task we focused on 3 key areas:

1. Discoverability: Improve the discoverability and accessibility  of Backyard Brain’s online resources

2. Interaction: Provide a more interactive, engaging, and dynamic customer support experience.

3. Community: Facilitate interaction and communication between Backyard Brains users to increase their sense of support and community.

Then, over the course of four months our team broke the project into a Research Phase, Design Phase, and Validation Phase.

The Research Phase

The goal of the research phase was to further explore and understand the needs of our user base, with the eventual goal of defining key requirements upon which to scope the rest of our design process.

The key points in our research process were as follows:

1. Digital Survey: Conducting a brief digital survey allowed us to quickly gather and synthesize user’s attitudes, behaviors, and characteristics. We were then able to use this data for a quantitative analysis as well

2. Open Card Sort: The card sort allowed us to gain insight into our user’s expectations surrounding information architecture. An open card sort was the best option as this was a new platform, and not a redesign of an existing page or product.

3. Interviews: These were in-person interviews to allow for a more qualitative, subjective, and nuanced exploration of our user’s teaching backgrounds and overall experience with BYB.

4. Persona Development: We then synthesized our main user characteristics into personas for whom we based our design.

5. Affinity Diagram: All of the findings from our research phase then culminated in the construction of an affinity diagram, our core method of research analysis. Our team collected the most salient notes we had, and grouped them according to similar trends and alignments we had. After forming initial groups, we then moved the observations into a hierarchical structure, summarizing each group with a statement describing the users on the second tier, and then grouping those statements, to form a conclusion on the top tier.

KEY FINDINGS

These top tier conclusions/findings in our affinity diagram were as follows:

1. Having a background in neuroscience makes a major difference in the user experience regarding Backyard Brain’s online resources and kits

2. Teachers and students are looking for guidance around the technology and material, as well as troubleshooting

3. Users greatly value collaboration and community with other like minded teachers

4. Users are looking for a more organized and informative structure to BYB’s online presence

5. Video material is a critical part of the BYB digital experience

6. Users value hands-on learning in the classroom

PROJECT REQUIREMENTS

The final outcome of our research phase was to define key “must-have” requirements for the design phase

These were as follows:

1. Collaboration with other teachers

2. Dynamic, customizable user-based product information

3. Troubleshooting support

4. Greater emphasis on video/demo content

The Design Phase

Using the data gathered from our lengthy research phase, we were finally able to move into designing the portal. This was an iterative process during which we designed, gathered feedback, and then iterated with an increased level of fidelity, ultimately ending in a near finalized design.

KEY DESIGN FEATURES

In order to ensure we were addressing our key “must-have” requirements as well as the initially established critical areas (Discoverability, Interaction, Community) there were certain especially important design features that we focused on.

1. User Profile

2. Pages for Products and Experiments

3. Forum

The Validation Phase

After coming to an (almost) finalized design the last step in our process was to design and conduct a validation study with our users. The purpose of this was not to come out with radical changes, but rather to confirm that what we had worked towards was indeed meeting the needs of our users.

*The point in time at which we were ready to validate our design coincided with nationwide lockdowns going into effect due to COVID-19 and as such we struggled with recruiting direct users. As a result, we recruited proxy users that best reflected our user pool, which were men and women age 22+ with an academic background.*

Our validation study was based on the following two research questions:

1. How intuitive is the platform to use to the average user?

2. How easily are users able to find information and navigate the platform?

To test this we conducted a single-system unmoderated usability test during which each user was given 4 tasks to complete, followed by a digital questionnaire.

The questionnaire briefly asked each user to then:

1. Indicate whether they completed the task (y/n)

2. Rate the difficulty level of each task

3. Rate how strongly they agreed/disagreed with a statement regarding the system usability

We were able to then aggregate the data from the validation study in the following graphs:

CONCLUSION

Despite the obstacles thrown at us, especially in recruiting, given the results of our validation study we were able to confidently move forward with this design as a viable solution that met our user’s needs by providing an engaging, interactive and most importantly usable platform that appealed to busy teachers.

View an interactive prototype here

Looking to the future

While we were not able to see this design through fully to implementation, there are certain key factors on which the continued success of a solution like this is contingent.

Engagement… Frequent and dynamic updating of content is what will keep users interacting not only with the platform but also with each other. Allowing this to plateau into a static site brings BYB back to square one.

Emphasis….This platform should not be sidelined or hidden as something extra or unnecessary. It should be prioritized just as highly as as any other central BYB resource.

Integration…This should be a seamless part of the holistic, end-to-end BYB experience.

With these factors in mind, our team was confident that the solution presented to Backyard Brains is one that will enhance and elevate their overall user experience and customer satisfaction.