.Knwlge
An Online Learning Platform
Project Overview
What? - An online learning platform empowering with personalized, interactive experiences. .Knwlge redefines online learning by fostering collaboration and personalization. This empowers course creators with powerful creation tools, and learners with interactive features, creating a dynamic educational community.
Approach - Our team completed this project using Goal-Directed Design as the design method, and created this prototype for our Senior Capstone project.
Duration - 13 Weeks (Jan 16 - Apr 16 2024)
Tools - Figma, FigJam, Microsoft Teams
PrototypeWhat is it?
.Knwlge is an application designed and prototyped as a class project at Kennesaw State University.
.Knwlge is an online learning platform that provides a collaborative and personalized educational experience. Unlike other existing platforms, .Knwlge prioritizes engagement and interaction, empowering both course creators and learners. Our vision is to redefine online education, making it more dynamic, meaningful, and accessible to all.
Design Process - GDD
This prototype was created following the Goal-Directed Design methodology. This design method follows a multi-step process flowing through phases of Research, Modeling, Requirement Gathering, Framework, and Refinement. As this was completed as a class project, these phases were shortened to fit within the given time constraints.
Research
Problem Statement
The current landscape of online learning platforms predominantly revolves around content delivery and assessments, overlooking the crucial need for collaborative and personalized learning experiences. Existing products lack robust tools for educators to create engaging courses and for learners to actively engage in a community-driven educational environment.
Literature Review
In our literature review, we examined studies analyzing the effectiveness of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in fostering soft skills and intercultural competence, explored the advantages and disadvantages of e-learning in university education, investigated interaction design principles for online learning platforms, gained insights into Learning Management Systems (LMS), and explored the role of motivation in MOOCs' retention rates.
User Research
To gather insight as to what online learners are missing, we conducted user interviews with users who all had varying levels of experience with online learning. This allows us to capture pain points people of all backgrounds in learning will encounter. After these interviews were concluded, we sat down as a team and started affinity mapping. Once all of our ideas were in the FigJam board, we categorized them into like areas.
Modeling
Behavioral Variables
With the data collected from the user interviews, it is then synthesized into behavioral variables. This allows us to gauge different features and how important they would be to our users, as well as how they would function. Patterns and preferences play a role into how the design would be made later down the road.
Personas
After analyzing the behavioral variables gathered from our user interviews, we identified a common pattern among several participants. These users shared similar preferences and priorities when engaging with online learning platforms. Drawing from these insights, we crafted two primary personas, Alex Mercer and Ollie Woods, to represent distinct user archetypes within our target audience.
Requirements
After finishing up with the modeling phase, we moved onto to the requirements phase of GDD. This involved brainstorming and developing a Problem and Vision statement, forming context scenarios, and creating a requirements list. All of this information was created using the information we have gathered in the previous phases.
Problem & Vision Statement
Context Scenario
Requirements List
Framework
Wireframing
Following our brainstorming sessions and initial concept ideation, we transitioned to FigJam to develop mid-fidelity wireframes. These wireframes represent a more detailed visualization of our platform's interface, incorporating essential elements and interactions while maintaining a level of simplicity and flexibility.
For our mid-fidelity wireframes, we focused on crafting key-path scenarios that reflect the most common user journeys within our platform. One of our primary scenarios centered around the process of accessing and enrolling in online courses. We aimed to streamline this path, ensuring that users can easily discover relevant courses, view course details, and enroll with minimal friction.
High-Fidelity Prototype
Once we had a solid mid-fidelity wireframe completed, we began prototyping a high-fidelity version of our app. We incorporated branding, color schemes, and more detailed design elements to create a realistic representation of the final product.
Within the high-fidelity prototype, not only did we focus on branding and other visual aspects, I spent a lot of time working on functionality using the new features in Figma, such as local variables and conditional logic. Examples of this can be found with the functional typing within the Username portion of the site that follows you throughout, or the modular colors and profile pictures in the onboarding process. These functions gave our project a reason to stand out amongst the other teams projects at the Capstone event.
Refinement
Usability Testing
Due to time constraints as the nature of this is a class project, we unfortunately did not have time to have any proper usability testing completed. We had general walkthroughs done and different perspectives look over the site to catch any issues we had not seen prior. We made some minor tweaks and scrapped some ideas, but overall there was not a large amount of refinement work to be done.
Conclusion
Overall, I am happy with how the project ended up. There are a few things here and there that I wish we would have had more time to add, but in general the site ended up better than I had originally thought. Being able to conduct proper usability testing would have been beneficial to get solid user feedback on the site as you would have with a design process such as Lean UX. I also wish we had time to add more modularity to the dashboard like we had an idea for at the beginning of the project. Being able to incorporate the ability to modify the positions and visibility of different features on the dashboard would make the site more suitable for each users preference, as well as would have been a fun challenge to attempt to incorporate within Figma knowing its limits. Aside from those, I had a great time developing this with my team and hope we all design bigger and better things in the future.
Tyler Eckert
User Experience Designer
Product Management
in/tylermeckert/
tylereckert03@gmail.com
