Uplift K12

Client

Uplift k12

Project Team

Cesar Elias, Yuliya Klishch, Caroline Craner, Melissa Bonnel, Timothy Katsaros,

Role:

UX | UI Design

 

Overview

Uplift K12 is a virtual teaching platform that allows teachers to use digital manipulatives and research-based activities on a collaborative whiteboard with their students.The activities utilize gamification techniques and a Concrete Representational Abstract approach.

Working closely with former teachers and co funders of uplift Mehul Shah, and Michelle Shah we learned that.

  • Currently students and teachers had not been utilizing the program, and students did not have a dashboard of their own.

  • The student-facing dashboard had inconsistent copy that confused the user when locating assignments and feedback.

  • We also wanted to encourage extrinsic motivation with elements of gamification. Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts.

Preliminary Research

 

With our comparative analysis, we analyzed how programs utilized the four basic principles of gaming.

Goals : Every game needs an objective.

Rules :Restrictions allow for tension and creativity,

Feedback: Players need to know how they are doing.

Choice: Participation must be voluntary.

top five feedback features.

 

We reviewed eight of the gamified programs to find the top five feedback features.

Color: Visual Feedback

Sound: Audio Feedback

Progress Bar Badges: Visual Feedback

point system: Reward System

Teacher and Student Interviews

 

We interviewed students and teachers to better understand successful models for motivation in the classroom. 

successful models for motivation in the classroom. 

  1. How important it was to be authentic

    1. “Kids are smarter than we think… it's about striking up that conversation with the kids and really getting to know them”

  2. It is important to get curious about your students

    1. “A lot of times a lack of motivation is just that you haven't keyed on how they want to learn or how they best learn.”

  1. The Covid Affect

    1. COVID propelled education forward, but the home lives of many students affected their ability to succeed.

Teacher Interview Takeaways

 

COVID propelled education forward, but the home lives of many students affected their ability to succeed. 

Within the interviews, we asked teachers questions about how they run their classroom and various reward systems they implemented in the classroom.

  1. Timing:

    1. While verbal feedback should be immediate, tangible rewards can wait.

  1. Clarity

    1. Needs to be clear and easy to understand.

  1. Variety

    1. Students value being able to choose their awards and apply personalization.

  1. Flexibility

    1. Sometimes you need to be able to give out rewards “just because”

Student Take away

 

COVID propelled education forward, but the home lives of many students affected their ability to succeed. 

  1. Some of the main take-aways we found with our students were the following

    1. They valued choice:

      1. in their activities in the classroom as well as the awards they were granted.

    2. Feedback is key

      1. Students want clear feedback they are doing, in games and in school.

    3. But make it personal

      1. Students are motivated to see their particular strengths and growth areas.

03 Personas

 

With all the data we were able to create personas and identified key needs and goals for our targeted user.

Key focus areas of user needs

Class flexibility

  • Classes that can easily fit into their busy schedule.

  • Options to workout on demand at home.

  • Different classes to spice up workout routine.

Inclusivity

  • Discover workout regimens that cater to their fitness level.

  • More affordability to allow all users to participate.

  • Connect with other fitness members in a judge free zone.

  • Users need to feel motivated by fitness instructors without feeling judged.

Problem Statement

 

Uplift K12 needs a student-facing dashboard that optimizes the student experience of the website by allowing them to quickly onboard, easily navigate, track progress and locate their assignments in an organized and intuitive manner.

Solution Statement

 

Create an intuitive interactive student dashboard based on gamification principles and key motivation insights, where students can review their assignments, track their progress, personalize their mood and message their teachers.

04 Sketch and LoFi Wireframe

 

Ideate

before we get into designing we needed to make sure we stayed organized. By creating a site map we were able to figure out what needs to go on what page.

Login Page

Home Page

Based on research students we found out that students needed clear feedback  on how they were were doing in school. the messages would reflected commonly used messaging interfaces that we hoped would allow for accessibility to students of all ages. 

MESSAGES

Based on research students we found out that students needed clear feedback  on how they were were doing in school. the messages would reflected commonly used messaging interfaces that we hoped would allow for accessibility to students of all ages. 

Profile | Mood

The mood is where we focused on an element of personalization for the students which allowed for students to be more inclined to engage with the program . after our interview with students we also found that many students were hesitant when asking for help so we hoped the mood tracker would allow for students to notify their teacher  about how their feeling in a more discreet way

Progress page

The progress we used fun colorful award and strength icons to symbolize and celebrate the students success, our research showed that elements like these can boost a students confidence and made their progress page personal to their individual success, it would mean more to them to see personal success than a just a grade or point system.

MedFI

05 Hifi Prototyping to the test

 

with the feedback from users in the first usability testing. We knew we needed to simplify every page.

  • For the mood tracker .We wanted to change it to a slider to simplify the way Ben told the Ms Garcia how he was feeling

  • In Messages we want to clean the interface by removing the older messages.

  • In the progress/ award page we wanted to only show strengths and awards.

  • Our Users loved the existing mascot that greets them in the sign in page, and we wanted to add it throughout.

Hifi

07 What is next?

 

moving forward we have some recommendations for uplift based off of our research, we believe exploring a more personalized reward system would be very helpful for students as well as building upon the connection between students and teacher, in addition we think it would beneficial to students to introduce some form of communication between students and their friends as well as testing these designs with teachers who use uplift and with that