Jim Weimer | Projects | Strut Learning

Creating E-Learning Tools for Students and Teachers

Over my last summer I worked at Strut Learning as a UX/UI Design Intern for their eMojo and SELDA projects. For SELDA, the EQ (Emotional Intelligence) Assessment for all ages, I designed new pages and marked UX issues with all pages during the Beta stage of development. For eMojo, the E-Learning classroom and lesson management tool, I worked on storyboarding designs for developers, user testing to find areas of improvement, and designing new pages by scratch.

Messaging System

One feature I designed myself was the messaging system. This system would allow students to message their teachers during a lesson, while the teachers could message their students individually or as a group.

The challenge here was designing an experience that would easy to use for students as young as 8 and teachers who can be much older.

I decided to use the familiar design seen on a smartphone to list the conversations on the left, while creating an easily identifiable chat-box on the right. I also tried to use buttons with words, rather than symbols, in order to simplify their intended functionality.

eMojo

Emojo is a learning platform that adapts to students' needs in real-time. Students can create full-length lessons including reading, videos, activities, and assessments.

SELDA Reports

The reports page for SELDA was something I helped design for the Beta version. We wanted teachers and administration in schools to see how their students' EQ scores developed over time.

To do this, we broke down the test by its competencies and gave specific information on student performances by competency. We also wanted the user to have easily-usable graphs with general statistics on scores over time. On the right, you can see our design for scores over time and more information on the current breakdown of sores.

User Testing

User testing for the alpha version of eMojo was my first dive working on a UX Research team. Nevertheless, I found this to be something I would love to do more of. Over the course of a month, we created a prototype of our alpha-stage development designs using Figma and tested a variety of teachers from around Chicago on their ability to navigate the site and use its features.

The Process

We first contacted and collected information from a variety of teachers around the Chicago area, including teachers from both public and private school backgrounds. Before they were tested, we asked about their experience with online learning platforms and classroom management systems, what they thought and whether they still use it now. Most of the teachers responded that they have had experience with online tools and acknowledged that whether or not they could use these tools, they would assist in their students' learning. For the real test, the teachers were given a set of tasks to complete on the prototype of our app as we observed and noted areas of struggle or confusion. Minimal assistance was given to test how quickly teachers would get used to our designs and help us figure out which sections needed improved user experience. Our end goal is for the app to have a quick learning curve, be easy to use, and feel usable and useful to our teachers.

The Results

In the end, we found multiple areas where the teachers were overwhelmed with a multitude of buttons and other features which made it difficult for them to quickly finish their tasks.
For example, in the picture below, teachers had a difficult time understanding the class comparison feature because the subject selection dropdown seemed more connected to the search-bar than the main div. However, in their closing statements, many of the participants liked the features we were introducing into the EdTech world: namely, the real-time adaption to students' needs and the ability to review their class' emotional intelligence development over time. This showed us that we were on the right track, and with some user experience redesign we were able to move into the beta stage of development confident in our ability to provide both a usable and useful tool for teachers.

jw.

Strut Learning: Emojo & SELDA