Role UX Designer/Researcher Duration 10 weeks
Team Pukhraj Sidhu, Phuong Tran Tools Figma
Overview
In my Introduction to User-Centered Design class, my teammates and I made a prototype of a website made for educators to support other educators. For a more in depth look at our project, visit https://whiteboard.myportfolio.com/
Vision
How might we enable educators who are overwhelmed with their teaching responsibilities to maintain healthy mental and emotional states in the midst of a pandemic?
Research
When we were tasked with helping a specific group struggling in the pandemic, my mind went towards teachers. I keep close contact with my high school teacher, who posted online that he was facing challenges with the changing environment due to COVID.
My team looked at pressing problems during the pandemic, and through our contacts we saw how difficult it was for educators to connect with their students and how much the switch to online class impacts their mental health. Through user interviews with educators, we were able to empathize and compile a list of pain points. We also did a competitive analysis with mental health solutions, and compiled these findings in user personas.
After more research and narrowing down of ideas, we put together design requirements that we knew our solution needed to address. We decided that a website would be the best way to navigate the problem. Through activities like storyboarding, we were able to contextualize our project in a user’s environment and narrow down the scope for the project.
Design
We used what we developed in our storyboards and information architecture to create a rough paper prototype of our project. We were able to fill out the details and how we wanted our three main pathways to look, and how each of them would connect together. We tested this low-fi prototype with educators once more, and included their feedback in our final prototype. Below is our final prototype (you might have to click the expand button to view it in full screen).
For our design language, we wanted to have a unified, clean, and calming feel to our website. We chose cool colors to be the main colors of whiteboard, along with a logo with a whiteboard marker as the 'i'.
Final Product
Reflection
This was one of the first remote projects that I worked on, and adjusting to working online with a team was interesting. I had great teammates and we agreed that being open and honest about our strengths and weaknesses was the right way to approach this situation, and were able to support each other throughout this project. Designing during the pandemic emphasized the importance of being empathetic - I was inspired to come up with this idea after seeing a post by one of my former high school teachers about how he was struggling to connect with his students and other teachers during COVID-19. If we had more time, we would have hoped to interview more teachers, especially those who differ from traditional school teachers- including tutors and home-school teachers to be more inclusive.
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