Industry
Context
Problem Statement
Our team stimulated a classroom learning environment to make design education more accessible to students who did not have resources or access to design classes: encouraging vicarious learning methods to excel scaffolding in the design thinking and learning process compared to ‘traditional design repositories.’
UX Goals
- Provide best examples and feedback that best applies to novice designers
- Help students learn design principles more effectively, produce higher-quality designs, and obtain new skills for performing iterative design.
Solution Preview
Browsing Design Gallery
Filter specific examples and view the progress of iterations, while keeping track of thinking processes
Viewing Design Item
View each design item and read expert feedback to understand why students made the changes they did
Design Reflections
Filter specific examples and view the progress of iterations, while keeping track of thinking processes
Existing Literature
From reviewing existing literature, many novices are unsure what to focus on constructing or improving designs. Students have an array of approaches to learning design but orient to cataloging methods. As a result . . .
With that in mind, we want to equip novices with the tools necessary to learn on their own, while still scaffolding the learning process through a vicarious learning model. We want to reinforce novices’ learning while they engage with the often abstract field of design.
Mid-fi Prototypes
Building on Dr. Yen's research, our team created wireframes and prototypes, refining each iteration with feedback from Professor Dow. Our goal: an informative gallery for novice designers. We conducted six user testing sessions and lab-wide feedback sessions with professors, researchers, and interns, shaping the gallery through open discussions.
Takeaways
Students learn design independently without guidance outside of classrooms and pursue their learning through design repositories. Changes to the prototype were made to prime the user to take an interest in exploring aspects of design they did not consider.
Pilot Testing
To determine the benefits of the gallery, we created a design knowledge assessment that quantifies and differentiates between ‘experts’ and ‘novices’ designers. I gathered previous designs made by students at UCSD and formed tests asking how well the design performed through sub-design principles and categories with two methods. Questions are based on a seven-point Likert scale for numerical analysis through t-tests.
Poster Data Quantity & Difference of Opinions
We had groups of novices and experts take our assessment. I revised the evaluation only to contain questions with a marked difference in opinion between beginners and experts, which was determined through the p-value of the t-test, standard deviation, and range for each question.
Final Design
Feedback from experts categorized and tagged by design principles and sub-topics
Favoriting and note-taking systems to allow for active slef-recletion while browsing
Content filtering, sorting, and suggestions to find relevant examples easily
Submission system to contribute your own work to vicarious learning experience
Expert ratings and critique to understand why students made the changes they did
What I Learned
Key Takeaways
This academic research setting differs significantly from my experiences working on passion projects or in a start-up setting. I learned new research methods and explored greater depths into our team’s interest in design learning!
Next Steps
We want to expand our design knowledge assessments by recruiting other ‘design experts’ such as professors, high school teachers, and industry designers with various skill levels. Also, we want to conduct more user tests to mitigate confusion on our high-fidelity prototype. Lastly, we want to run more pilot tests to revise our design gallery further.