Background
The NCEA students have difficulty sitting mock and real assessments in schools due to pandemic, sickness, absence, taking different subjects, and not being ready to take the exam when teachers say so.
How Might We
How Might We help the NCEA students to take online mock and real assessments anytime and anywhere without a teacher’s support?
How Might We simplify the assessment’s long entry process and provide clear security checks instructions for students?
Solutions
To build an online platform to allow students to take online assessments anytime and anywhere.
To simplify the assessment entry and provide clear instructions for the security checks.
Roles
- Lead the product design deliverables
- Facilitated user research and ideation sessions with the team
- Conducted field study
- Produced mockup designs
The design deliverables before the launch day
My role is to provide design support and bring design solutions that work with the engineering requirements and tight deadlines.
- A progress tracker to help users be informed of their location in the assessment entry.
- Provided the instructions in activating the browser security checks. It includes a share screen, mic, and camera.
- A sticky footer that allows users to go through the next step without scrolling down
- Splitting the question and answer into two columns will enable students to read the questionnaire while inputting the answer
Field study
The team went to the high school to conduct a field study. The goal is to observe how teachers and Year 13 students complete the online assessment in their class. We were divided into two classes. One class uses laptops, whereas the other class uses desktop computers.
I wrote my notes while observing the teacher and students taking to the process of the online assessment.
Affinity mapping
I facilitated the session with the design team, where we wrote down our notes and split them by observers into two columns. Then we clustered the related sticky notes and discussed our observation, students’ experience, technical errors, and paint points.
Journey mapping
I used journey mapping to list the user, expectations, touchpoints, our observations, actions, thoughts, and pain points using the Miro board.
We presented our findings to the broader team and looked for opportunities to iterate the outcome.
The design iteration
Combining the business requirements and our user research data, we facilitated a brainstorming session through whiteboard sketches. The goals are to reduce the assessment entry process, give clear instructions to security checks and apply heuristic principles to improve usability.
The design
From whiteboard sketches, we started by building the wireframes to visualise how it would look using Figma. We used the wireframes to communicate with the broader team the plan, solution and to discuss the technical requirements and limitations. After we got the approval, we started converting the wireframes to mockup designs.
Applying the Peak-End rule, we used illustration in the assessment entry and security checks as they are the most stressful part of the setup before reaching the assessment itself.
We divided the design works where I focused on the information architecture, layout, UI behavior, and technical side while my team was in charge of the illustration and UI elements on the security checks.
Conclusion
Due to the shift in business priorities and Covid lockdown, we couldn’t conduct another field study set, but I plan to set the remote moderated usability tests when we get back on track.
