EduQ

An online schooling app for teachers and students.

What is EduQ? 👩🏻‍🏫

EduQ is a mobile application designed during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic to tackle the difficulties faced by K-12 students and teachers amid the abrupt shift to online education. The aim was to provide a unified solution for all essential activities of the schooling experience in a single platform.

Team

Me (Design + Research)

My Role

Research, UX Design, Interaction Design, Prototyping

Time

Jun 2020 - Aug 2020

Mid-fidelity screen of a tablet screen

Problem 🧐

During the COVID-19 pandemic, students and teachers had to quickly move to online schooling. In India, the necessary online education tools to support this shift were not available. Schools stayed closed for several months initially, leading to the use of different existing third-party apps for conducting classes, assignments, and other educational tasks when there was uncertainty about when schools would reopen.

Goals 🚩

To create a unified solution to assist students and educators in the online schooling.

Jump to Solution

The process I followed...

Firstly, Research 🔬

But why?

To understand the current trends in e-schooling.

To understand the challenges and opportunities in the e-schooling experience.

To understand the existing solutions used or available.

How did I do it?

Secondary Research

Remote interviews (1 teacher + 2 students + 2 parents)

Source: The Hindu

Insights from students and parents

Most commonly used platforms:

1. Lectures - Zoom, WhatsApp, Google Meet, Cisco Webex, Teams

2. Exams/Assignments - Google Classroom, WhatsApp, Emails

Majority students used mobile phones for communication and joining classes.

Limitations:

1. Shared with family members

2. Limited internet

Used platforms like YouTube, Khan Academy, UMANG to learn different concepts on their own

Did not have access to resources like textbooks, notes from missed class, etc.

Keeping track of class schedules, assignments and their submissions would be difficult to manage for students and their parents.

Insights from teachers

Shared assignments via email, WhatsApp, or using Google classroom.

Faced problems keeping track of submissions over email and WhatsApp.

Managing students, their attendance, and keeping them engaged during online lectures were some issues faced.

Used mobile phones, tablets, or laptops for delivering lectures.

Scheduling classes and keeping track of their schedules was difficult.

Ideation 💡

Choosing the platform

The most commonly used devices were smartphone and tablets among students whereas teachers used either smartphones, tablets, or laptops.

However, since majority of the target audience used smartphones, I decided to create a mobile and tablet compatible application.

Defining the typical class structure

Note: Class = Grade

Feature brainstorming

Tying back to the research insights and the class structure, I prioritized the features and user flows within the app.

Other features brainstormed

Prioritized features

Information Architecture

Teachers' IA

Students' IA

Design Iterations ✏️

Based on the ideation, I created a mid-fidelity prototype that was used for usability testing.

1. Setting up profile (Teacher)

Mid-fidelity flow for setting up a class

What design decisions did I make?

Language Selection -

In India, multiple languages are used in school.

Teacher's Profile -

Teachers can setup their profile with basic information.

If class teacher -

then has to create a class.

Class creation -

Teachers can create a class by adding students, other subject teachers, and information about the class.

✅ What worked :

Teachers liked the Language selection option. Made the app more inclusive.
The class structure was verified by all teachers.
Adding participants by contacts in phone made it easy to setup the class.

❌ What did not work :

The 'Subjects you teach' field in profile was an unnecessary field.
Participants said that they would want to not immediately create class after creating a profile.

What design changes did I make?

Simplified the flow -

Redesigned the flow and removing unnecessary fields.

Skip option -

Added a skip option to allow teachers to create a class in the future from the menu options.

Clean UI and progress bar -

Created a consistent and clean UI with labels and fields and buttons to go to previous steps.

Added progress bar in the class setup flow.

High-fidelity flow for setting up a class

2. Schedule feature (Teacher)

Mid-fidelity screens for schedule and create lecture

What design decisions did I make?

Schedule page -

This page allows the teachers to see their schedule for the selected day.

Scheduling lectures -

Teachers can schedule lectures for different subjects and classes.

✅ What worked :

Teachers appreciated the ability to view not only the schedule for the current day but also upcoming dates.

❌ What did not work :

Class teachers faced confusion regarding whether they were viewing their own schedule or the schedule they had set for their class.
Non-class teachers were presented with the schedule lecture call-to-action, even though they do not have the capability to schedule lectures.
Schedule lecture form had a single time field instead of having start and end time fields.

What design changes did I make?

Separate tabs for class teachers -

Created separates tabs in the schedule page for teachers to view their own schedule and their class schedule.

Improved Schedule lecture form -

Added the missing fields.

Removed CTA for Non-class teachers -

Removed the schedule lecture CTA for non-class teachers.

High-fidelity screens for schedule and create lecture

3. Live lecture (Teacher)

Mid-fidelity screens for live lecture

What design decisions did I make?

Video, audio, whiteboard -

During research, I found that educators required functionalities of video, audio, and whiteboard the most.

Making lectures engaging -

A challenge that emerged was maintaining student engagement. To address this issue, I added features like polls, quizzes, integration with YouTube, and screen-sharing functionality.

Managing students -

Educators found it difficult to manage students' misbehavior. Therefore, offering options to mute all and mute chat will assist them in effective management.

✅ What worked :

Teachers appreciated the features like whiteboard, recording, and muting.

❌ What did not work :

Educators felt overwhelmed by the multiple features.
The absence of labels for these features resulted in confusion among them.

What design changes did I make?

Removed overwhelming features -

I asked the educators to identify the features they wished to retain and subsequently removed other features that caused confusion.

Added labels -

Added labels for all the features in the live lecture to avoid confusion for the educators.

High-fidelity screens for live lecture

4. Bottom navigation

BEFORE

Labels came up when the navigation item was selected.
The navigation for "Notes" and "Recordings" displayed both a recording icon and title, causing confusion for students when assigned the task of finding the notes.

AFTER

Added labels for all navigation items which are always visible.
Used color and weight to show selected menu item.
Renamed the menu item to 'Resources' for both Notes and Recordings to enhance clarity and reduce confusion.

Other Teachers' Screens 📱

BEFORE

AFTER

Other Students' Screens 📱

BEFORE

AFTER

Lastly, Reflections and Learnings ✍🏼

Embarking on my first UX project, I undertook diverse responsibilities, managing tasks like research and design independently. This experience proved to be a significant learning opportunity, and I successfully applied my theoretical learnings to an actual project.

I encountered various challenges during the project, including difficulties in recruiting participants for research and testing due to the pandemic. To address this, I utilized available resources such as secondary research and a limited number of participants.

Reflecting on the project's scope, I acknowledge that I may have been overly broad, attempting to address numerous challenges and cater to diverse user groups. In hindsight, it would have been more effective to focus on a smaller, defined set of groups, potentially based on location or educational boards (state, CBSE, ICSE, etc.).