When I joined the project, surveys and interviews were being conducted with participating Singaporean special needs schools. There were 141 students spanning 3 separate age groups between preschool to 12th grade, and 20+ teachers involved.
Functionally, we knew there wasn't anything wrong with the usability of the existing version. In the previously conducted guerilla usability tests, all participants (some facilitated by their educators and social workers) were able to complete goals of the game successfully. My focus then, was to comb through the feedback and user data to synthesize the findings in order to identify pain points and opportunities that would increase user engagement.
This project really had 2 different groups of users - the children with special needs, and their teachers who assist them in using these tools. Because of this, we surveyed and interviewed the teachers who closely watched and assisted with the students' interactions. The feedback varied, but the three most common frustrations that lead to low user engagement included the visual design of the interface, the complexity of the game (ie. levels) and accessibility features.
"It is easy to use and the concept to teaching emotions is fun, but it doesn't grab their attention like other games and can be difficult to have them focus on it for longer periods."
"I would want to introduce more emotions. My students are able to understand the basic emotions but not more complex ones (ie. irritated, bored, tired)."
"A few kids in my class cannot read and the indicating icons on the buttons are quite small."
When we sent out the beta version for user testing, we were focused on the user experience and less on the user interface. Unsurprisingly, the user interface largely impacted the user experience. Especially for children with cognitive impairments like ADD or ADHD, a stimulating visual interface can help increase engagement. I took on the liberty to create a few low level sketches of potential designs that could successfully improve the users (and their facilitators) frustrations. Shown below is a sketch I made of the landing page. You can also see in the next section, the difference in before and after screens.
After identifying trends in the data and pinpointing common frustrations I summarized the information and presented my findings and potential solutions to the teams.
One of the findings was that many students gave up earlier than the time allotted. Although lack of interest was one reason, many teachers indicated that it was usually within the last minute of time allotted - due to either anticipatory failure or a high self-induced pressure to perform. I suggested that this was likely mediated by the countdown timer, and we changed this feature to a regular time spent indicator.
A second widely noted pitfall of user engagement was the lack of range within the game. Some teachers said that the chosen facial expressions were too monotonous for their group, while others noted a lack of challenge. Taking into account the wide range of ages and abilities amongst the students, we decided to implement multiple quizzes with varied difficulty levels to choose from, allowing each individual to engage in material tailored for their needs, and maximize their time spent learning.
A feature implementation born out of the user research was adding levels to the game. Through working with Ivan, I got to learn more about design psychology, and how we can use different psychology principles to guide the user experience. Due to my interest in the design solutions, I was tasked with helping our product designer Ivan to further flush out potential solutions. Through working with Ivan, I got to learn more about design psychology, and how we can use different psychology principles to guide the user experience. Together, we made many research informed design decisions.
Overall, I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to intern at DSAIR while studying abroad. This experience was a lovely introduction to applied research, and gave me a solid foundational understanding of how to conduct and analyze surveys, interviews and user tests. Additionally, having previously worked in an academic quantitative neuroscience research lab, this internship felt like a breath of fresh air. It was exciting to see a more immediate gratification of my research efforts that applied research can often provide. One week I would be synthesizing data collected, the next I would be presenting it in front of the teams and then shortly after I would see my contributions implemented in design and code! Through this experience I also grew my understanding of user experience design and really appreciated the symbiotic nature of research and design when advocating for the user.
If I had more time at the centre, and if it was allowed, I would love to do an ethnographic study to follow up on the impact of our collective work. I believe that equity in education is tremendously important and it would bring me joy to see my work through.
