Projects
AAPI Digital Textbook
Foundational research on college students and professors to create a digital textbook containing 50+ yeras of AAPI history.
Role: UI/UX Designer
Timeline: 7 weeks
Tools: Notion, Google Forms
Project Overview
The Asian American Studies Department aimed to make a digital AAPI Textbook for high school and college students. 50+ years of AAPI history condensed into a free, accessible online textbook.
Background & Problem Statement
Client Needs
We first met with our clients at the Asian American Studies Department to understand where they currently were in their project timeline and how we could help them reach their goal:
- A report on user needs and wants: what would make teachers and students want to use the textbook?
- Wanted to understand how to create a textbook that is effective, engaging, and educational.
Problem Statement:
How might we present AAPI content in a way that improves the educational experience for both undergraduate students and professors?
Research
Identifying User Needs
We found that there were 2 main groups of users that would be using the AAPI Digital Textbook: Professors and Students. Since there was another group that focused on high school teachers, our group focused on undergraduate students and professors.
Research Goals:
Validate that there is a problem worth solving
Understand student and professor goals and pain points
Identify what students and professors want in an online textbook
Define desired outcomes for students and professors
Interviews
Undergraduate Students
- Demographics
- General Questions regarding the classroom experience
- Digital Resources
- Blue Sky* questions about ideal online textbook
Undergraduate Professors
- Demographics
- General Questions regarding the classroom experience
- Curriculum Development
- Digital Resources
- Blue Sky* questions about ideal online textbook
* Questions about what the online textbook would do for them in a perfect world.
Timeline
Research Outcomes
Insights
We found that a major pain point that troubled both undergraduate students and professors was “finding relevant and reliable resources quickly”.
Undergraduate Students
Undergraduate Professors
Refined Problem Statements
Based on the information about the user needs and pain points in our research, we came up with refined problem statements for both the undergraduate students and professors.
Undergraduate Students
How might we...
- Help professors gauge student understanding of the course material?
- Provide professors with a quick, efficient, and affordable way to find and use relevant and reliable resources to integrate into their classroom curriculum?
- Help professors better visualize their lessons with multimedia content?
Undergraduate Professors
How might we...
- Help students feel more engaged and connected with class material?
- Reduce the time spent on finding reliable resources?
- Present material in a way that is easily digestible?
User personas
To help us guide our recommendations, 2 personas were created based on the student and professor pain points and needs:
Experience Map
We created an experience map to document the user’s feelings, needs, influences, and actions as they take steps to achieve their goals in order to help us gain an understanding of the user’s mindset.
This map also informed our list of recommendations
List of Recommendations
We consolidated our research insights and created recommendations based on our findings, the personas, and experience map.
Recommendation #1:
Provide reflection activities such as discussion questions after each resource that prompt students to think more deeply about the material.
The textbook can record student responses to these prompts.
Recommendation #2:
Create a resource hub with multimedia resources organized by topic.
Particular emphasis on primary source resources and narratives.
Text resources should be concise and supported with visual references (images or videos).
Recommendation #3:
Provide methods in which students and professors can save resources/parts of resources to reference later.
Allow students & professors to organize/group resources into customizable folders so that they can reference them for assignments/lectures
For text resources, allow students & professors to highlight and annotate parts of the text. These highlighted sections and annotations should be saved and stored in user profiles for their future reference. This way students & professors can view their general takeaways from each source rather than have to revisit the entire resource as a whole.
Recommendation #4:
Each multimedia resource should be supported with a short-form text description to provide a brief background of the topic discussed or shown.
Ensure that the text is not limiting to professors, such that they have the flexibility/room to "pick-and-choose" certain sections of the textbook.
In other words, this text should be more descriptive rather than argumentative.
Recommendation #5:
Ensure that the online textbook can be easily accessible for users from all walks of life.
Follows WCAG AA/AAA color accessibility standards
Images have alternative text
All videos have language and close-caption options
Text resources have audio options
Audio resources have text options
Web responsiveness across desktop, tablet, & mobile devices
Text size flexibility
Make free for all students & professors
Priority Matrix
To illustrate the importance of each of our recommendations, a priority matrix was created that indicated its value to the user and the effort it would take to implement.
Learnings and takeaways
We found that in the future, it would be beneficial to gain more clarity on what the stakeholder’s vision for the project is.
For some of our recommendations, such as allowing the professors to customize the order in which resources are organized, one stakeholder wanted to know whether professors would be willing to take the time to learn and adopt this, but we were unable to provide him with an answer from our research. In future projects, it would be a helpful idea to include a question about how willing users would be to learn a new task for a potential features.
We excluded any prototyping from our scope, but by the end of the project, we found ourselves wanting to come up with some designs to demonstrate some of the recommendations we were talking about, but due to the timeline, we were unable to do this. This taught us that even though a project might not be built out, it would still be beneficial to include some kind of design in our scope.