Sensei View
Case Study
The first part of my project toyed with a redesign of the onboarding experience for first-time users coming onto Microsoft Communities.
Duration:
1 semester
Tools:
Figma, Miro, Blender
Role:
Researcher, Designer
Overview
At the start of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted millions of lives around the world. Due to the pandemic, many activities that were once in person became online and remote, making some peoples' jobs more difficult than they were previous to the pandemic.
Amongst many working professionals, educators who teach physical skills were impacted severely, as contact during this time was considered a potential health hazard. Over the course of our semester, my team and I were tasked to explore, ideate, and develop an idea to address real problems that these educators were facing in today's day and age.
Problem:
Educators who teach physical skills need a way to be able to connect with their students in a virtual world.
Solution
My Process
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To understand our user group and gain a better understanding of the space we were trying to design around, my team and I became curious with our user group by engaging in interviews.
Interviews:
With our goal to become as familiar as possible with educators teaching physical skills during the pandemic, my team and I interviewed a total of 10 people. I was responsible for leading 2 interviews, and I became a notetaker for 2 other interviews.
Key Findings and Insights:
With several of the educators that I interviewed, my team and I noticed several trends while making sure that the energy and excitement that were once there for in-person activities still remained there.
Since all of the educators that we interviewed were pre-Gen Z, we found it a common theme to have our final idea be easy to use. In simpler terms, our UX and UI needed to be seamless for adults to use in this digital era.
Because every educator’s teaching style and material was different, we needed our product to be adaptable with a range of physical skills being taught at home.
User Personas
Because we spoke to a variety of users from different fields, we curated 3 personas. Ultimately, we decided to differentiate our personas based on their motives for teaching the physical skill. My team and I revisited the user personas frequently in order to remain centered on designing around our user group during the duration of the entire project.
Ideation
Our team's initial plan for generating ideas for our problem was to use Miro and its workspace as a canvas to rapidly jot down 100 ideas. Once we jotted down our ideas, we categorized our ideas in a framework to see which ideas were grounded, in the blue sky, and on the "fanciful horizon". From these ideas, we selected the top 9 that we thought could be included in the final solution for our stakeholders.
We narrowed down our ideation to 3 ideas that we found lay on the fanciful horizon. With each of these ideas, I made a diagram to showcase the idea and what values they addressed related to our main problem statement. This was very helpful to present to not only one another but also our professors during our design review.
Prototype
Finally, our prototyping stage. Each team member played a unique role in developing a mid-fidelity mock-up of our online platform, Sensei View. I was in charge of wire-framing and creating certain screens that would showcase Sensei-View's main purpose - to connect educators who teach physical skills in a world where most activities were remote. I was exposed to using Figma for the first time, and with a time constraint of a week, I ramped up with watching free tutorials on YouTube. In addition, I focused on showcasing our user research and creating a product poster in Adobe Spark.
Low-fidelity wireframe for our project, getting the hang of Figma
A final re-design of a page of our mock-up.
A final poster done to showcase our product.
Reflections
This was my very first time exploring with phases in the design cycle, and I absolutely fell in love with the process. I began to truly understand why every decision needed to be backed up by research. Most importantly, I realized design is a form of engineering because it is, in its basic form, problem solving. Design thinking meant empathizing with the user above all else, and I found this mindset spread across all facets in my life, from engineering work to personal relationships. I concluded the semester with a new-found curiosity for UX Design, and I knew I wanted to explore more of the field the following semester.