Since our last class on Thursday I've been thinking a lot about the upload process of the website because I've developed the floating side panel next to each course, offering a call to action to upload their work, but I haven't figured out exactly what that page might look like, until now. Originally I had planned to just have a dropdown of courses, which the student could select their elective, and then upload their blog link immediately after rating the course. However, in my user testing I found this wasn't as effective as I would have hoped. People weren't exactly sure where that button would take them, if it was off the page or not, and there was definitely a sense of "what's in it for me?" The user experience also wasn't great, in having a dropdown and just straight up asking for the link without offering a compelling reason why.

I also got great feedback from a lecturer who told me to look into my stars rating system a bit deeper. He offered the viewpoint that there are some lecturers at the school who are very hard on students, and can come across as mean at the time, causing students to potentially give the class a bad rating. He asked his class of fourth years whether they enjoyed the Type core at 100 level at the time, and everyone remarked how their lecturer was very hard on them, but the fundamental skills they learnt in the class were undeniable. 

I was thinking about a rating system involving a tinder-like swiping system, where students could quickly get through a bunch of different questions by swiping left or right on yes or no questions. This design aimed to game-ify the upload processStill, there was no answer for the ‘what’s in it for me’ question. It was more like a glorified survey rather than something that offered a 'why am I doing this?' – still, it helped me form my next ideas.

Until I had a realization – I asked myself, how can I make surveys fun, sure. But most importantly what motivated people to do surveys. What kind of surveys are motivating? I realized a lot of friends of mine seem to love quizzes on facebook where they help identify personality traits, all for just answering simple questions (they also collect and sell that data in a non transparent way, but that’s another rant). In these quizzes, as thanks for letting us collect all this personal information on you, we'll show you your personality trait. Adobe actually just had one of these, and roped me into doing it! https://mycreativetype.com

It made me realize I actually do have something valuable to offer students, using the power of algorithms: personalized recommendations on which courses to take. Since students are likely on this website selfishly to look into future electives, I could play into that motivation. I could kill two birds with one stone, offering students questions which I could use in an algorithm to narrow down potential matches for future courses they should take, while also collecting information about how much the student enjoyed their last course. 

‍Outcomes

‍This lead to two outcomes I’m really happy with. The first is the new rating/upload flow. It asks 5 simple questions of students. 

Select 3 tags or ‘categories’ which relate to the course

Did they enjoy the course? Y/N

Did the lecturer teach the course well? Y/N

Did you learn a valuable new skill? Y/N

What is your blog link? 

The last one, what is your blog link is the most valuable one, as students have told me they value that information above even photography of the course, because it allows them to see what the course is like, week by week, as well as seeing not just the finished product, but the development along the way.

The second outcome related to the upload flow, is a new section in the course page with a working title: ‘stats’ which shows students the answers to these questions from previous students. They take the data that students have answered, and anonymously add them up to indicate important information to prospective students at a place. For example, 47% of students were glad they took the course.

‍Removals

In this process, I’ve removed the questions and answers section – why? – simply put, in user testing students told me it would turn them off if they had a question they had to really think about (even if it was only a tweet length answer.) Also, when doing my sorting cards game with two separate groups of 4, they both put questions and answers in the bottom 75% of information heighracy, ie what they would care about most on a page about a prospective elective.

‍I also removed the star-based rating system, in favor of the new stats section. This relates back to my earlier user feedback where one lecturer (and his class) mentioned a great point to me about students giving a harsh rating because they didn’t like a lecturer or thought they were too harsh, when in reality they did learn a valuable new skill – this new system breaks those data points up so it’s easier for other students to see what is good about the course and what isn’t – so if the lecturer is eh but the course material is great, they can make a decision based on that, rather than just seeing a pretty vague star number. 

‍I’ve also removed photo upload – in my testing I found that students told me they routinely move their work onto hard drives or cloud storage after they’re done the course, and since I would only be getting visitors to the website during periods like the 6 week break and summer break, this is a period where they would likely not have their source files or images on hand and ready to upload. I’ve been told by almost every student I’ve talked to that they would be far more likely to link to their blog, which they have available and in some cases memorized, rather than connecting their hard drive, transferring the files over, opening the files, exporting images of the finals and uploading. Especially when in most cases that work is already on their blogs anyway. I also had feedback in my two sorting tests that students preferred blogs over photos of work, since they could see the development, and they didn’t mind having to open multiple blogs for each course they were looking into, since they ask 3rd years to see their blogs anyway, or try and google them by themselves.

Summary

Overall I’m really happy with this work, but it will definitely be down to testing it - especially the questions I’m asking and the friction in the blog upload section. But I’m quite confident that once they see there is benefit for themselves, and they’re helping other students it will motivate them rather than just having the latter. One thing I think might need work is the interactivity of the survey questions, the great thing about the buzz feed and adobe quizzes is that they offer you answer buttons that are unique to who you might be, and while they serve the same Y/N purpose, it makes the user feel like "Hey! They're really getting to know me!" when they ask questions like are you an introvert or extrovert? Are you the person against the wall of the party or talking to everyone? My questions so far are just yes or no, but I did experiment using a multi choice answer, which I'll test tomorrow at uni.

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I’ve also updated the CTA on each individual course page, but the copy needs tweaking for sure. Time to sleep!

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