Design Process

Exploration Phase

■ Literature Review

Before we dive into the process of on-site explorations, we conducted literature reviews of project-based learning, makerspaces, and the role of documentation and portfolios.

We specifically looked at the examples of PBLWorks, Maker Movement, and Open Portfolios project to understand current pratices and learning goals in PBL.

From the literature review, we found the following elements to be important for PBL courses:

■ Understanding Educators

To understand the current challenges that are specific to our client, we first conducted semi-structured interviews with two educators - the instructor of the PBL course and the school director.

Interview with Mr.M - Class Instructor

Interview with Dr.F - School Director

Synthesis and Analysis

To better understand the relationships among the challenges of these stakeholders and their concerns, we used diagnostic maps to analyze the causes, consequences, and possible solutions of the problems, including documentation, assessment, feedback, and showcase.

From the diagnostic maps, we identified that poor documentation is actually the root problem for other problems in assessments, feedback, and showcase.

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Without good documentation of both the work artifacts and the work process, it will be hard for students to showcase their design process and iterations to the instructor and to the community. Thus, it was hard for the instructor to track and assess their improvements and for the community to recognize the achievements of the students.

■ Understanding Students in Context

As we pinpointed documentation as the main and root problem in the class, we proceeded to investigate the students’ current practices of documentation in their projects through on-site observations and understand their opinions on documentation through online surveys.

Synthesis and Analysis

We used an affinity diagram to summarize the findings that we collected from both the observation and the online survey.

■ Defining Design Vision

Based on the insights and findings from our research phase, we defined our design vision to be:

Design Phase

■ Ideation

Brainstorming and Storyboarding

To generate design ideas, we conducted a brainstorming session following our design vision. We came up with 50+ initial ideas and grouped them by the specific points that they are targeting.

Through discussion and voting, we narrowed down our potential solutions into 20 representative and reasonable scenarios and created storyboards based on these scenarios.

These storyboards represented different directions of possible design, including low-tech vs. high-tech, learner-centered vs. technology-centered, etc.

Validating Ideas through Speed-dating

To validate the stakeholder’s needs, we conducted a speed-dating session with Mr. M. The purpose of the speed-dating session is to explore the stakeholders' acceptance of the potential design ideas and see if the design ideas would cater to their needs.

We organized the instructor's feedback regarding each design idea and synthesized the following findings.

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■ Making Design Decisions

Based on the speed-dating and our previous research, we made the following design decisions regarding the main features of our design:

* Hover over card to see evidence

With these main features chosen, the learning experience can be shown with the following journey map:

Prototype & Iterations Phase

After we decided on which features to include, we started our prototyping process. The main goal of prototyping was to test the flow of the design solution to gather feedback from the stakeholders/users and make iterations based on their feedback. We were mainly focused on the role of our design in students’ learning experience and the look-and-feel of our design.

■ Paper Prototype & Wizard-Of-Oz Testing

For the first round of prototyping, we decided to use paper prototypes with lo-fi interfaces in a Wizard-Of-Oz style testing. These two prototyping methods are low-cost and time-efficient for us to get feedback on the role of our design.

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From this round of prototyping, we found that the students like the general idea of our design. They also provided specific feedback on individual features, based on which we made the following iterations:

■ Video Prototyping

For the second round of prototyping, we would like to test the look-and-feel of our design. Therefore, we created hi-fi interfaces for the realistic feel and a video prototype for showing the actual use scenarios.

See video transcript

We showed the videos to the students in the class and other students who normally participate in PBL courses and gathered their feedback to further polish our design.

Post Mortem

What worked well?

We did solid user research and worked closely with our stakeholders to co-design the solution.

We did great needs-finding and synthesis to help consolidate our design features.

What could be better?

We need to consider more about the business value of our design in educational contexts.

Prototyping needs more time. We could do more user testing and more iterations to polish our design even more.