As part of the "Usability Engineering" course, our team was tasked with redesigning a mobile application or website to improve its usability and user experience. After careful consideration, we chose to focus our efforts on Blackboard, a course management system used at our university.
Course Project
Sep 2020 - Dec 2020
UI Designer
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Graphic Designer
Yang Ismailov, Azhar Smagulova, Olzhas Yessenbayev
Blackboard brings together various course assignments, syllabi, announcements, grades, and useful emails (although this can be customized based on the course and the instructor’s wishes). All Blackboard tabs are managed by the instructors to upload materials, create assignments, and schedule them. On top of these, Blackboard has a bundle of communication tools that allow students and instructors to interact within the built-in portal system and produce more reflective communication.
🤔 The Challenge: How might we improve user experience and usability of Blackboard to satisfy users?
It was impossible to engage instructors in the study because their accounts contain sensitive information, such as students’ grades, assignments, quizzes, exams, etc. Therefore, we involved only undergraduate students as they were easy to approach and they make up 51% of the whole user population. All studies were conducted online through Zoom due to the COVID-19 outrbreak.
After creating a research plan, we conducted a pilot study with two students who had a prior experience using Blackboard. However, experienced users had become so accustomed to the system and could easily utilize the system to accomplish their goals. Thus, we couldn't find any usability issues to improve. Given this unexpected outcome, we adapted our research plan to incorporate additional participants who had no prior experience with Blackboard. Below is the final study we designed.
Tasks performed by the new users of the system were analyzed through the prism of Norman’s Usability principles: good consistency, visibility, feedback, constraints, mapping, and affordance. Below is a summary of the insights: instances of the user fails due to the violation of Norman’s usability principles.
👀 Key Insight: Users were not satisfied with the system’s interface and experienced negative emotions.
We’ve identified the following ranking of the function importance from card-sorting by averaging each card’s order for the 5 students (the smaller the number, the more important a function is). Then, we went on to analyze the contents of our interview and usability studies in order to explore emerging problems with these tasks, rank-ordered in regards to their importance
👀 Key Insight: Experienced students don't like to explore the system and stick with functions they know.
Based on studies with new and experienced users, we created two personas: a 3rd year student and a 1 year student who just finished school.
To capture the feeling of the future system, we created User Stories featuring our personas.
Using gathered insights, our team generated new designs. Firstly, we created a low-fidelity sketch.
Based on that, we created our first low-fidelity prototype. Below is a comparison of our proposed design with the existing system.
Our team developed a low-fidelity prototype of Blackboard and conducted a second usability study with the goal of identifying any design flaws or mistakes we may have made. We recruited 4 users (3 UNIST students + 1 high-school student) to participate in the study, and we asked them to complete various tasks on the prototype while we observed their interactions and collected feedback.
Thanks to this study, we were able to identify things that needed improvements and address them in our final prototype.
