Revitalizing courseware for more effective studying
How can we create products that better support students’ study habits?
Overview
Pearson is one of the largest providers of textbook-based courseware on the market. My of our widely opted offerings, like Mastering and MyLabs, were old, difficult to use and felt like enterprise software. It was created with the instructor in mind, without regard for student’s study habits and needs. We aimed to change that by better understanding student needs and collaborating with students directly.
Role
I partnered with a UX manager and product managers to move from discovery research to identify product opportunities. As a UX researcher, I led discovery research, co-facilitated a design and storymapping workshop, and led iterative concept testing to identify product opportunities.
Methods
Contextual inquiry and artifact gathering
Storymapping
Participatory design
The problem
How can we create products to better support students’ study habits?
Because digital courseware is primarily marketed to the instructor, it often failed to support students’ primary study habits, and students opted for external study resources outside of their primary courseware. We realized that we had a gap in our knowledge of student study behavior which prevented our team from creating effective study tools.
Solution overview
Understanding user needs: observing students’ study behavior
Together with a team of researchers, we set out to local libraries, coffee shops and dorm rooms to observe first-hand how students study and what print and digital materials they use throughout the process. Through this, we identified a few key behaviors where we wanted to focus our efforts:
Referencing notes, textbook, and other items while doing homework
Using study guides to aggregate and synthesize materials for comprehensive exam study
Storymapping workshop
Over the course of several days, as a collective group of designers, researchers and product owners, we reviewed the research and defined themes and How Might We statements to define how we could create an engaging and effective learning experience for our students.
We conducted mapped out user activities, starting with high-level user tasks, and ultimately landed on designing a system personalized to the student that would have two distinct modes: homework and study.
Co-design with students
We further validated our hypotheses by conducting a co-design session with students. Students took part in story mapping activities and filled in gaps, and together with our design team, sketched designs for their ideal courseware solution.
Outcome
After additional testing and refinement of our solution, we defined flows to allow the user to reference content at any time, be alerted to topics they should focus on and create custom study guides.
Student dashboard
Assessment with reference drawer
Study guide