Making Zoom a more visual and engaging virtual learning space for younger students.
Zoom Features Mockup
OVERVIEW: The Student Reward System and Interactive Board features ensure that students stay more visually and mentally engaged with Zoom classes by rewarding them for positive behavior, hard work and participation and also allowing them to follow along with the teacher’s lessons in real-time, while emulating the classroom feel.
TEAM: Alonso Rosado, Max Speyer, Kimberly Tanny & Kevin Turnowski
ROLE: UX/UI Designer, UX Researcher - User Research, Competitive Analysis, Visual Design, Mockups and High Fidelity Prototype, User Testing
DURATION: 1 Week
PROBLEM
Elementary school teachers struggle with maintaining engagement with some of their younger learners on Zoom. The current Zoom software has some features to increase engagement, however, the software is targeted more towards business professionals and older users. Teachers would like to have new features that can increase engagement and productivity with their young students and make learning more fun and a visual and interactive space.
SOLUTION
The Student Reward System would make learning and participating in Zoom classes more fun for young Elementary school students. The Interactive Board feature would also increase engagement with students and make it a more visual and productive learning environment.
The implemented Student Reward System rewards students for positive engagement and participation.
The implemented Interactive Board feature allows students to work with the teacher in real-time and to easily see learning activities and exercises that the teacher shares. It also emulates a classroom environment with its visual layout.
PROCESS
Our design team began the 1-Week sprint with an initial Zoom meeting. I led the project and helped organize the time blocking of the design activities. We voted on Elementary school teachers as the target audience since some members of the team, including me, had a connection with local teachers who have previously used Zoom for instructional purposes, especially during the Coronavirus Pandemic in 2020. We discussed the Design Process, volunteered for different tasks based on our skills and experiences and set deadlines for completion.
Design Thinking Process
RESEARCH
User Research survey incentive for participants - $40 Amazon Gift Card
Our design team conducted both quantitative and qualitative user research to get more insights from teachers about their experiences using Zoom as a teaching tool.
Quantitative Research
Screener survey via Google Forms
19 participants
Personal Network via Social Media and email; Reddit; Teachers group on Facebook
We chose to target Elementary school teachers with younger students as the audience, pinpointing our research and design on ways to increase and maintain focus and engagement in online classes.
Based on secondary research, the average age of public-school teachers in the United States is 40-45 years
76% female teachers, 24% male teachers
Our quantitative research conducted via a User Survey on Google Forms with 19 participants yielded similar results
Key Findings
Student engagement was a major concern for many teachers and proved difficult to maintain.
Difficulty to provide necessary attention to individual students, especially for varying ability levels.
Current features didn’t provide enough involvement for students and proved difficult to use at times (ex: raise hand feature was easily missed by teachers)
Qualitative Research
2 participants
With each participant, we began by reviewing the questions from the survey, followed by more in-depth questions to further understand their needs, pain points and ideas surrounding student engagement
Participant #1 - Age Mid 60s, Experience 40+ years teaching elementary & middle school
Participant #2 - Age Late 60s, Experience 20+ years teaching elementary school
Key Findings
Real Classroom like Visual Feature - teachers want to engage students in a fun, visual way that mirrors a real classroom
Reward System - young students love to be rewarded for their hard work and participation
Tool for replicating in-class handouts or worksheets
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Examining current Zoom features and competitor features that increase engagement
Competitive Analysis
Key Findings
In general, all of the existing video conferencing software all share similar features for engagement, as is evident in the chart. There is a need for newer features that are targeted towards younger users that teachers would be able to leverage to increase engagement and in turn, productivity with their students, in a remote learning environment.
Website Inspiration
Our design team used Class Dojo for design inspiration in adding the reward feature to Zoom. Class Dojo is a popular website already used by many Elementary school teachers. We liked the visual graphics and simplicity of the reward system and were inspired to add something similar to our Zoom website redesign.
Class Dojo Rewards image
Class Dojo participation point awarded
STRATEGY
USER PERSONAS
We created two user personas. The average age of public school teachers in the United States is between 40-45 years old. Also, per our secondary research, there are about 76% female teachers and 24% males. Our own numbers with the research yielded an 82% female to 18% male ratio.
Taking these statistics and findings into account, we created two female personas. The primary user persona is based off our quantitative user research as well as secondary research. The second user persona is based off of our qualitative research (user interviews).
Alice Diller User Persona #1
ALICE DILLER
42, 1st Grade Teacher
San Diego, CA
Bio
Alice Diller is a 1st grade teacher who has been teaching for 20 years. She hasn’t had trouble transitioning to virtual learning with Zoom, but she has trouble retaining the attention of her students and promoting engagement.
Goals / Interests
Keep students interested in virtual learning
Maintain individual relationships with students
Increase comprehension through participation
Implement classroom familiarity into virtual learning
Reward students for good behavior through Zoom
Pain Points / Concerns
Reward systems/incentives for participation used in real life aren’t available through Zoom
Students at her grade level find it difficult to use Zoom independently
Hard to promote engagement through Zoom
Not enough interactive activities available virtually
Bernice Smith User Persona #2
BERNICE SMITH
62, 2nd Grade ESL Teacher
Denver, CO
Bio
Bernice is a 2nd grade ESL teacher. She has been teaching over 40 years and has had trouble transitioning to virtual learning spaces. She faces challenges similar to other teachers.
Goals / Interests
Manage groups of students more effectively
Keep distractions to a minimum in virtual learning spaces
Increase engagement with students
Implement interactive components into virtual learning spaces
Work with small groups of kids while being able to watch over others
Pain Points / Concerns
Kids often don’t have control over their environments which can be distracting
Kids have easier access to distractions on their devices such as YouTube
It’s more difficult to give students individualized attention
Zoom lacks the friendly aesthetic that classrooms often have
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
USER STORIES
As a teacher, I want to be able to increase engagement and make virtual learning more fun by rewarding my young students for their participation and hard work.
As a teacher, I want to be able to increase engagement on Zoom, limit distractions and allow students to be able to better follow along with my virtual lessons.
USER FLOWS
We created two user flows: one to represent the Rewards System feature and the other to represent the Interactive Board feature.
The user flows address the user stories.
Rewards System User Flow
Interactive Board User Flow
WIREFRAMES
WIREFRAME SKETCHES
We started with the Crazy 8s sketching and presented our sketches to the team via a Zoom meeting where we discussed the designs and picked our favorite idea, which was the interactive board design. We decided to implement an interactive board as one of the features along with the rewards system for the second feature.
Crazy 8s Sketching Alonso
Crazy 8s Sketching Kimberly
Crazy 8s Sketching Max
Crazy 8s sketching - Kevin
Crazy 8s Sketching
Crazy 8s Sketching Max
DIGITAL WIREFRAMES
We digitized the wireframes on Figma to showcase the interactive board. The icon for the rewards system was also added.
Interactive Board Wireframe
Open Interactive Board Wireframe
Rewards Wireframe
BRANDING AND IDENTITY
ZOOM BRANDING
Color Palette, Typography, Logo
Zoom is a well-known software that is used by many educators and business professionals. Zoom has a strong branding including the logo, color scheme and typography.
We did consider creating a Zoom Kids version initially, however, to stick to the scope of the project and be able to meet the deadline of a 1-week sprint, we decided to keep the same branding material so that our design was consistent with the current branding.
VISUAL DESIGN
I was responsible for the visual design and spent some time studying the Zoom UI including the icons and elements of design like the lines, shapes, colors, typography and spacing
We also used ClassDojo as inspiration to design the Rewards section.
We kept the user interface of our design the same as Zoom so that users wouldn’t have issues learning how to use the newly added functions.
I recreated the icons used in the Zoom desktop software and also designed icons to use with our Interactive Board and Rewards System features that would be more engaging to younger students.
I also updated the components used by my team member, Alonso, who was in charge of the wireframing.
MOCKUPS
Zoom Features Mockups
SOLUTION
USABILITY TESTING
I was responsible for creating the high-fidelity prototype and initially did some self-testing to ensure that there were no errors or bugs and to ensure that the prototype functioned and flowed properly.
Our team conducted usability testing via Maze to get user feedback. Due to time constraints, we had a limited number of participants.
6 participants
95.8% completion rate
36.9% completion rate
13.1 second average duration to complete each task
KEY FINDINGS
Users had issues with the testing software Maze, which didn’t display the entire prototype screen so when users scrolled down, it would reset to the top over and over unless the user reduced the size of the screen – we did add a description to the instructions to zoom out so they were able to see the entire design. The guidance helped, but users found the issue to be annoying.
The biggest feedback received was to improve the UI of the Leaderboard section and separate the Whole Class/group from the individual student list.
Based on user feedback and recommendations, I iterated the design. The second iteration has an improved UI for the Leaderboard section and it is much easier to see the distinction of the groups/class. The host/user also has the option to customize groups.
Prototype Iteration after Usability Testing
CONCLUSION
LEARNINGS
We learned to collaborate with team members and to understand their perspectives.
We also sought to understand team roles and capitalized on the design strengths of each team member.
Our team learned how to work within the time constraints since this was a short 1-week sprint. We time blocked and prioritized our tasks.
We also held stand up meetings every day to share our progress and also to go over any tasks that still needed to be completed.
Based on the time constraints, we were only able to get a small sample population of participants for our user research and user testing, however, if given more time, we would spend more time conducting research and interviewing more teachers.
Personally, I also learned more about quantitative research methodologies and reaching out to admins of social media groups to find participants.
NEXT STEPS
Although our deadline for this project was just 1 week, if we were given more time, the following would be our next steps:
Conduct additional user testing with a larger user base to get additional recommendations and feedback
Design additional versions of the rewards pop-up page and rewards notification pop-up and conduct preference testing to allow users to provide feedback.
Thanks for reading!
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