Redefining Canvas to help students achieve effective collaboration and communication while working in teams
Core Problem
Canvas is a LMS (Learning Management System) used by students at Indiana University and many other universities in the United States for their academics. However, it doesn't support effective communication and collaboration while working in teams. Thus, we redesigned Canvas to improve the communication and collaboration features to help students perform better while working in teams.
Project Scope
Design Concept (Team academic project)
My Responsibilities
User Research, Wireframing, Prototyping, Visual Design, User Testing
I divided my user research into two parts: primary research and secondary research. Primary research included online research, reviewing articles, journals, getting to know the numbers and statistics. Secondary research consisted of user and expert interviews, surveys.
Team communication and collaboration is highly crucial for project success and performance
Inefficient tools for collaboration lead to loss of productivity and delays
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As remote working rises, collaboration tools allow teams to work remotely. Students need to adapt to this culture
Online collaboration tools and digital workplaces facilitate increased productivity by up to 30%
86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures
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In today's academic scenario, collaboration is one of top four important skills for student success
We conducted 10 interviews with students to understand their pain points and to understand how students are expected to collaborate and function working in teams at their workplace, we also interviewed an expert. Here are a few user quotes.
"Email communication with professors' takes too long and makes me impatient"
"I wish I could get quick feedback from my instructors' on my assignments before I submit them
"Why doesn't my university have a dedicated space for team related work?"
"Why should I install additional messaging apps just to communicate with my peers"?
After conducting secondary and primary research, we gathered all the findings and did affinity mapping. We jotted down our findings on post-it notes and grouped them into categorical themes to generate key insights.
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We created a user persona that envisages all our findings, represent our target user, and describes their needs and pains. From the personas, we discovered critical reasons for inefficiencies with communication and collaboration in students.
Designing the user persona and formulating the problem statement helped us in identifying the key pain points and needs of students to focus on our design direction.
How might we help students communicate and collaborate efficiently
while working in teams?
Existing LMS and communication platforms
1. A mix of social and and academic environments
2. Most platforms are specially designed for professionals
3. Confusing user interface design
Existing cloud storage platforms
1. Lack of dedicated project space
2. Not student oriented and absence of user-friendiness
3. Steep learning curve
After doing the competitive analysis, we realized Canvas, that is used by students at Indiana University, can be leveraged and extended with functionalities of collaboration and communication. This would a feasible and correct design direction rather than developing an entirely new product that brings its own new learning curve and adaptability.
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Hence proposing the design solution of "Creating a digital workspace and a rich-communication service by redesigning Canvas to help students collaborate and communicate better while working in teams". The MVP is as follows
Our first objective was conduct rapid prototyping using pencil and paper to visualize our core design features. After designing the paper sketches, we referred to our user persona and key findings to validate our design decisions. Sketching ideas on paper first, helped us in minimizing design errors in later stages of prototyping.
Collaboration feature
The collaboration feature enables students to
Communication feature
After collectively brainstorming and sketching out the initial ideas for our solution, we created the low-fidelity wireframes on Figma to better visualize the structure and the essential functionality of our design solution.
After designing the low-fidelity wireframes, we went to get feedback from students on campus. We received positive responses from them along with critiques which we noted to incorporate in our next iteration.
Collaboration feature
Communication feature
To make our solution more accessible and usable, we incorporated the communication feature for the Canvas mobile app too. The rationale ties back to our research insight of helping students communicate on-the-fly with their teams or professors. For the collaboration feature, we only added real-time collaboration updates due to the constraint of mobile platform.
Students can start conversations with peers and can even create groups to communicate.
The user interface screens for peer and group conversations. The interface is designed keeping in mind the familiarity of existing chat applications.
Students receive updates about team progress. One-tap actions like accepting/rejecting meetings, uploading and downloading files also included.
We performed qualitative and quantitative usability testing with students at IUPUI to detect usability issues in our prototype.
For qualitative testing, we asked the students to explore our prototype at the same time speak what they feel about our solution, and also asked them to perform 2 tasks on our prototype.
To understand if students are able to create a collaborative space for their team related work, and if they can easily navigate through the prototype.
To observe if students can easily communicate by sending messages and whether the RCS feature is intuitive and usable to them.
From the think-out-loud sessions, we obtained some interesting insights and feedback
For quantitative testing, we sent out surveys to students to get their feedback on our prototype. We used Google Forms to create surveys and collect responses.
Initially struggled to define the right problem to solve. Going back to key findings and brainstorming helped in defining the core problem. I realized not defining the right problem leads to a design solution that is unusable.
Witnessed the importance of sketching out ideas on paper before proceeding to low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes. Sketching helped in minimizing the effort and errors in later stages of product cycle.
Conducting usability testing with subject matter experts, user experience designers and developers immensely helped in understanding the accessibility of our design features.
