This page provides a higher-level overview of my process as the UX researcher on a team with one other graduate researcher at UF for designing a collaborative learning tool for children. This project was done as a part of the Human-Computer Interaction and the Learner course at the University of Florida.
My Role as a UX researcher for an Educational App
Our goal for the CLICK project was to propose an educational tool that helps improve children’s (ages 5-10) collaborative learning skills. Interacting with CLICK, a web app that allows children to collaborate virtually will help children develop ability to work effectively and respectfully with diverse team members. I contributed significantly to my teams’ process of uncovering children’s needs and came up with design solutions that helped children develop and build collaboration skills.
One of the biggest challenges of designing technology for children is to ramp up on the domain knowledge related to child-development literature and further design educational technology that is tailored towards children’s physical, motor and emotional needs. I lead the efforts to understand developmental needs for children ages 5-10 based on the existing literature and also conducted an in-dept interview with a school teacher and 3 children to help our team move forward towards designing a collaboration skills-building technology for children.
User-Centered Research
What did we ask?
We asked 3 children to discuss what they think about their collaboration experiences in a school project. We also asked a school teacher to discuss her observations on children’s collaboration processes as well as her thoughts on what team-building skills are important in children for being a successful team player. Both children and teacher were our personal connections.
What we learned based on the synthesis of our user interviews?
- Provide children a safe environment where they can develop and improve their soft skills, especially communication skills and public speaking.
- Provide children with a team environment where they can collaborate and interact with each other to promote team agreement and accomplish complex tasks.
- Provide children a platform where they can share their soft skills and learn how to give feedback.
- Promote children to become a great team player and have better communication skills.
How we moved forward?
We developed initial design solutions to address user needs. The initial design solutions were developed based on our knowledge from education technology and child development literature. To help us conduct a quick and dirty testing of our designs we created wireframes. Here is the link of our wireframes: https://nikitaece111064.wixsite.com/click1/low-fidelity-wireframes.
Nikita Soni 