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RESEARCH, DESIGN AND EVALUATION  | 2023 | INDUSTRY-SPONSORED PROJECT

Increasing engagement during office hours

DURATION

January 2023 - April 2023

Overview

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Office hours are a way for students to receive help from professors and teaching assistants, as well as a way to bond with their educators. These sessions involve the professors setting up time slots for students, and students attending these office hours, coming into their designated meeting locations, and receiving help from educators.

 

For our sponsors at Innovatemap, we delved deep into how office hours function here at Purdue University. Purdue University’s office hours do not reflect the office hour structures used nationwide in the education space.

ROLE

Product Designer leading a team of 7 undergraduate designers at Purdue University

DESIGN OUTCOME

A service design prototype of the proposed product's final design vision.

WHAT I DID

Mentoring, User stories, Wireframing, Feedback Iterations, Hi-Fi prototyping

Problem

PROBLEM

Getting students more involved

  • Many professors have office hours to help their students through their courses and provide other guidance for their college careers.
     

  • Lack of student attendance can cause professors to lose the sense of connection to how their students understand the course and cause students to go on with unanswered questions. 

Solution

SOLUTION

3 user flows where students can : 
 

  • Schedule office hours 

  • Discuss and collaborate on the forum

  • View the professor's and TA's profile

Outcome

DESIGN OUTCOME

To tackle the problem of students finding it challenging to adapt to the large and competitive classes and trying to seek assistance, but being unable to because of office hours being always crowded which leads to confusion and discouragement, our team decided to create a home screen which provides the major information like upcoming meetings and scheduling options

Home page for students with easy navigation options

Students often felt intimidated in asking questions to the professor directly or aloud in class with the fear of sounding "not intelligent enough". We addressed this issue by designing a forum that lets them ask questions anonymously as well as have an environment of discussion and collaboration

Forum page navigation with the option of replying, searching and asking questions

To address the issue of students not having a connection with the professors and being unable to decide what to talk about during office hours, we decided to include a professor's profile that highlights their interests, hobbies, and research interests

Professor's profile screen

SECONDARY RESEARCH

Understanding how students currently navigate office hours

Research

- Research Areas

Academic Support
Student Motivation
Student Engagement
College Teaching
Current structure of office hours
Realising Benefit
Seeking Career Help

- Potential User groups

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Undergrads and graduates

Undergraduates

Undergrads in large lecture style classes

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- Key takeaways from Affinity Mapping of research findings

We found that the two main aspects of encouraging student to attend office hours were under the social and logistical domains. There were also barriers students faced such as personal stigmatization, physical barriers, and misunderstanding of office hours.

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Social and Logistical aspects
Personal stigmatization, physical barriers, and misunderstanding

INTERVIEWS

We synthesized all of our primary research (Interviews) data in the form of an affinity map, which helped us generate higher-order themes and insights into this problem space.

GOALS

  • Understand the current system or structure of office hours in different universities
     

  • What are the issues, pain points, and barriers undergraduate students face when attending or trying to attend these office hours? 

    • Discover the particular areas where they face a gap in communication with the professors, the limited availability of professors and TAs, scheduling gaps, etc. 

AFFINITY DIAGRAM

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KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM 18 INTERVIEWS

  • Professors and TAs are always occupied with other people during the 1-2 hours they have
     

  • Students face a variety of challenges and obstacles that prevent them from attending professor or TA office hours, such as time constraints, distance, a lack of direction, and unclear believed advantages, resulting in a lack of engagement with the resources at hand. 
     

  • Students are afraid they’ll ask stupid questions and they get easily intimated by professors who are not very approachable
     

  • Students said they discovered that most of their peers had the same doubts but nobody brought it up in class.
     

  • Professors mentioned that they like to discuss any ideas that the students might have related to academic work, answer their doubts etc.
     

  • Professors desire a welcoming environment where students don't feel anxious or guilty about approaching them. They encourage students to drop in and greet them, rather than thinking of it as a bother.

BRAINSTORMING AND IDEATION

PHASE 1: SKETCHING

Ideation

To get higher-level design ideas out quickly without worrying much about the design patterns, I chose to follow the Crazy 8's technique. I kept referring to the insights from the affinity map and spent 1 minute per wireframe. These sketches were also guided by "How might we" questions that we came up with during our research. 

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PHASE 2: WORKFLOWS

I came up with a possible workflow that we could delve into for designing our platform. This helped us align our designs and imagine a user journey for the students using this platform. This was the phase where we decided that instead of creating an extensive platform, we would focus on 3 features - Scheduling, Forum, and Profile sections.  

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PHASE 3: LO-FIDELITY SCREENS

Next, I moved on to refining these sketches in Figma and deciding on a design system and its subsequent patterns.

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PHASE 4: MID-FIDELITY SCREENS

In between creating our low-fi and mid-fi, my team was part of a poster show where we got feedback on our initial designs and the next steps. The mid-fis were created according to the feedback provided. 

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GETTING FEEDBACK

Testing

"How do I go to scheduling from the home page ?Calendar view or click on class?"

"Appointments vs Classes colors are very scattered"

"On the week page, how do i know that I’m supposed to click on the class to schedule something"

"If you could put in your classes into this and combine those” “have it send out your current schedule."

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The calendar was removed from the home page and scheduling class cards were added instead. 

A simpler navigation to the forum and notifications page on the left

An Upcoming meetings section added on the right to make it easier for the students to view appointments 

The Professor's and TA's profile sections could be accessed directly from the home page by clicking on their icons

Interests, Research Interests and other classes taken by them were added to the profile in order to give the students a personalized view of the faculty

The forum section was modified to have an overview of all classes and upvoting, commenting, and replying features were added

A direct CTA for asking a question was added which had the option of posting questions anonymously as well as a filter for sorting questions and search results in the forum

FINAL DESIGN

Final Design

To make our platform look more appealing we altered the layout and UI Design to make it more straightforward and accessible for the students. Some of the UI Design changes included - 

1. Using the Atlassian Design system as a reference 

2. Left navigation to different pages

3. Hover interactions for information

4. Click on the name card display and several CTAs to be redirected to the scheduling screen

REFLECTION

Reflection

Taking a step back, I now know  

During iteration, we identified limitations in our design that would be addressed with more time.

  • Emotional Aspect
    Students often go through fears, and intimidation and are self-conscious when it comes to talking to professors, and while our forum section helps them ask questions anonymously and discuss and collaborate with other people, it doesn't necessarily remove all the emotional aspects of being an introvert. 
     

  • Social and Networking Aspects 
    Just providing interests and hobbies for a professor doesn't give them the actual interaction factor other than just looking at a bunch of information on the screen. That information does not enforce students or professors to increase the personal time.

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My team at a team bonding event

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