For this project, our team was charged with improving student outcomes by evaluating the ease of use of our authoring tools. To accomplish this, we first sought out alignment with our development teams. With our DPG partners that lead the authoring tool development, we pulled usage data to prioritize our work on the most frequently used widgets, and aligned with the development team’s cycle planning for custom MHE Habitat widget technical enhancements.
Heuristic Evaluation
Our team researched existing authored content across current disciplines pulling as many use cases of authored content as possible to understand the depth and breadth of different content types.
Using Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics for UI design, we had multiple reviewers evaluate a collection of four artifacts. In addition to the usability inspection method we also pulled in experts to review for accessibility WCAG 2.0 compliance, academic integrity, brand alignment and visual design, as well as instructional design.
Refined user scenario to design against
As a student assigned a drag and drop activity, there is no clear style differentiation between the instruction line and the drag objects to indicate that that text is interactive, causing user fatigue and confusion.
Interactive prototypes
The designers created iterations of the new solution across multiple content sets. They implemented the new concept with examples that were art based instead of text, contained multiple drag objects per drop zone, content with style constraints around the drop zone that were inconsistent with the proposition.
The design team found existing web conventions and studies on primary and secondary actions from LukeW that solidified the new button alignment.
