[September, 2010 - Present]

Critical Web Reader is a web-based educational tool designed to guide teachers and students to critically evaluate any source of information on the Internet. It is now widely used by over 2,000 students and teachers from different levels of educational institutes, universities, middle schools and secondary schools, in several countries such as Singapore, Taiwan and the United States.

Roles and Responsibilities

In the CWR tech team, I have two roles. One is interaction designer, the other is tester.

As a designer, I have two major responsibilities. On one had, I preserve the existing features and functionalities in the initial design of the tool. On the other hand, I design new features to make the tools more useful for our users: teachers and students. I am also involved in part of graphic design work for the interface as well.

As a tester, I am responsible for conducting usability tests and providing usability expertise. Besides, I take part in quality assurance tests as well.

Process

The old design of CWR tool was created years ago and it needed to be redesigned when I jumped into the team. The redesign would be a brand new one. But I, with other designers, were aware of the most urgent mission at that phase was to improve the usability of existing features, because they were the core of the tool. We ran through several evaluation sections on the old design to spot every usability issues. The core features would be kept in the new design, with different forms of interaction. In order to know how these features would be best used, we talked to many users (teachers) and conducted card sorting activities. At the end we had categorized the core features of the tool. After several brainstorming sections, we had created the initial new design.

Then we came to the phase where we designed new features. We talked to educationists, teachers and created personas to get to know our users better. Coming along with lots of brainstorming, sketching and prototyping, we designed new features that drove the tool more personalized for users. Now users are able to create their own resources to use in the classroom. More importantly, they are encouraged to share the resources with each other, which vastly enhances the productivity of using CWR as a educational tool.

After I became the only designer in the team, I am still responsible for designing for new features as well as improving the usability of existing ones. I conducted many usability tests during this phase, from formal ones in the studio to informal ones in public areas. Because the system is too complicated to be tested in full function every time, which cost lots of resources, I decided to run multiple quick tests for different part of functionalities. I created many redesigns after these usability tests. The CWR team held a few workshops during this phase, feedback from these workshops became great insights for me. Some new features that would increase interaction between teachers and students as well as between different teachers were designed recently.

Concept and Prototype

The core of the CWR tool is some sets of questions invented by educationists. Their research indicates students’ ability of thinking critically increases after they evaluate, through answering these unique questions, the information from web (text, video, audio etc.). For immediate use by teachers and students, as well as wide use all over the world, the CWR tool is web based. One of the major improvement of the new version of CWR tool is that it enables teachers to create their own resources and share with each other. Computer Supported Collaborative Work seems the direction the next new design is going.

For this design, I have created more than 100 pages of formal wireframes which are being used. Based on this wireframe, I also created clickable HTML prototypes. These prototypes were used in all usability tests. For each page, I also created about two pages specifications (with screen shots) for development team’s use.