PlanIt
PlanIt is an app that fosters teacher-to-student and student-to-student academic interaction in American middle schools.
It’s a platform where students can schedule advisory sessions with teacher and tutoring session with student tutors, with a faster and more effective process.
Duration: 10 weeks
My Team: Lucas Tucker, Doris Liu, Peter Zhang
My Role: User Researcher, Prototype Designer
Tools: Figma
Skills: User Research, Interaction Design Prototype
Design Ethnography
01 Problem Area
“Internationally, U.S. stands in middle of pack on science, math, reading scores“ (Pew Research, 2015)
We targeted America middle school faculties and students, with students’ academic performance as problem area.
02 User Research
Email Survey
We emailed open-ended survey questions to middle school principals from the Seattle public school district, and the Anne Arundel County school district in Maryland.
Unstructured Interview
We interviewed teachers from Hamilton International Middle School to get their perspectives of students academic performance.
Expert’s Input
We managed to talk to Marc Tucker, President and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), to receive his input on the current state of American Middle school.
03 Research Result Analysis
Advisory Periods
“Sign-up process is slow and distracting.“
Tutoring
Professional tutors are usually available, not are expensive for public middle schools.
School-Manage Application
The many steps to accomplish any individual task causes resistance from the teaching staff in their implementation.
Marc Tucker’s Input
“Student tutors are the least expensive but the most productive style of learning.“
Problem Defined
How can we make the sign-up and scheduling process of advisory periods and tutor session more efficient to enhance American middle school students’ learning?
User Persona
Scenario Storyboard
This storyboard is based on the second persona — Mason D. Watson. He is a 9th grader living in Wallingford, WA. The storyboard depicts his problem with academic performance and how our potential solution PlanIt could solve his problem.
Design Requirements
The students can search available sessions easily and register/cancel the session by one click. This is targeting the users’ needs that requires more efficient sign-up process.
01 Easy Search and Registration
We want to include multiple colors for our app, considering that our target users are middle school teenagers. Specifically, we want to use colors to distinguish who leads each session. Yellow indicates the student tutors themselves lead the session. Blue indicates a teacher advisory session. Green indicates a student tutor session.
With consistent color boxes, distinguishing different sessions becomes more intuitive to the users.
02 Colors
Rather than seeking help from teachers and other student tutors, the students will be able to become tutors themselves and offer help to others. The students will need to get permission from their teachers of certain subjects.
03 Student Tutors
Final Prototype
Reflection
As my first UX project, I was really satisfied that my group was able to conduct in-person interviews with middle school teachers, and based our solution on the user research findings. However, since we were all new to user interviews, we accidentally asked some leading questions in our interview. For example, we mentioned our potential solution and used some leading words such as “frustrated“ in our follow up questions. For future project, I hope that I can be more cautious and avoid asking leading questions during interviews. Collaboration in my group works perfectly well. Again, since we were new to the field of UX at the time of this project, we worked on everything together. There was no specific roles assigned to each person. For future project, I would love to try take on more specific roles, especially user researcher or main prototype person.
Rewards
We received the “Best User Experience“ award, for the fact that our interface targeted the users well, and that we conducted formal user research and based our design on the result.