Internship at Minerva Project
A fun and informative overview of the students’ activities on Forum for a term.
Ambition
How might we provide an overview of a student's term on Forum in an engaging way?
Roles and Responsibilities
UX Design: Sketches, Wireframing, User Interface Design, Feature Prioritization, Prototyping
User Research: User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Usability Testing
Project Context
Role: Product Design Intern
When: Summer 2022
Timeline: 12 weeks
Tools used: Figma, Illustrator
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Summary
This was my internship project at Minerva, where I designed a fun and informative overview of students' activities on Forum, a learning platform used by many academic institutions globally.
I conducted user research, analyzed similar initiatives from different platforms, and designed wireframes to explore features related to performance, participation, and sociability. I developed high-fidelity UX/UI designs, a design system with all components, created illustrations of elements and Archetypes to represent student engagement, and incorporated user feedback to refine the final product.
The result was a responsive standalone webpage that provided students with valuable insights into their performance, encouraged more participation and attendance in class, and humanized the learning experience on Forum.
👩🏻💻 What is Forum?
Beyond Typical Online Platforms
“Rather than a one-way conduit for information sharing or a repurposed business conferencing tool, the learning environment offers a deeply engaging digital experience for learners and instructors alike. Its robust features, varied learning modalities, and data gathering and management tools offer capabilities and insights not available in any other platform.”
Read more about on Minerva’s Website: https://www.minervaproject.com/our-approach/forum-learning-environment/
🎯 Ambition
The Forum Review aims to provide insights into the students’ activities over the last semester, year, or program. The intended users include students and instructors from partner institutions of Minerva Project utilizing Forum for learning purposes.
🏔 Goals
Studying References:
I analyzed various yearly reviews from different platforms, identifying common trends like ranked performance, real-life data comparisons, and a storytelling approach enriched with neobrutalist design (e.g., Spotify) and many illustrations.
Exploration and Wireframes:
After defining our goals for this project, I started researching and collecting interesting visual references. I developed a list of potential features from Forum we could explore in the Review and started designing the initial wireframes for the idea.
Iteration 1: Features Exploration
From the first wireframes and a few rounds of feedback, I defined what elements we would approach in the first iteration. The goal was to highlight performance, participation, and social features.
📚 Performance Features
✋ Participation Features
💬 Sociability Features
Research and Feedback
I interviewed students, professors, academic directors, and engineers to understand how the users would react to the Review. I summarized the data by highlighting common observations, behaviors, and important considerations made during the interviews.
Feedback Summary:
People enjoyed how positive the overview was and felt there could be more context on a few of the elements, especially regarding participation. An overall concern shared by the people interviewed was the possibility of students performing “badly” (e.g., only low scores, many absences). All the interviewees had an exciting reaction to the Review's sociability components, especially regarding the Forum Archetypes.
📚 Overview and Performance Section
✋ Participation Section
💬 Sociability Features
🎨 Archetypes Design
In a Forum Classroom, students and professors have eight options for reactions - a colored emoji to express emotion. The research stage showed that the opinions on Archetypes were unanimously positive. I then continued to improve the design and copy of all the archetypes for each reaction.
Final Archetypes:
Final Design:
After processing the data from the interviews, I incorporated the most relevant points of feedback into the final iteration.
- I worked on adapting to constraints. As there was now a new point regarding privacy concerns for comments display and a share option, I made this section more concise and limited the sharing action for archetypes.
- I rearranged the order of the sections, improving their flow to the user. I also removed the information regarding absences after analyzing its purpose, as we wanted to keep students’ mental health as a priority.
- I reviewed and improved the wording of the review. To conclude, I created a simple responsive version for tablet and desktop, highlighting all important notes regarding sizing and spacing for the developers.
Learnings:
🙇♀️ What I Learned:
- How to communicate my work to different audiences;
- How to adapt ideas to the goals, different teams, and stakeholders;
- Analyze and apply feedback effectively.
🙋♀️ What I Would do Different:
- I would like to have explored more features for the Review, which is an idea for future versions;
- Explore different ways to motivate better participation and performance;
- Work on animations to make the review less static.