Illustrated by Emma Tsai
Background
Peer-To-Peer sharing is becoming more valuable as the objective to improve the quality of our education continues to grow. Partnering with Microsoft Teams, I designed an additional feature that enables anonymous alias to encourage students to participate using comments during lectures, which contribute to their participation grades through a peer-to-peer sharing learning experience. Ultimately, strengthening Microsoft’s online brand for the student community.
The Design Challenge
How might we build an enhancement on top of the existing MS Teams app to improve class engagement to their learning materials and make learning more interactive?
The solution
An enhancement on the existing MS Teams app that allows students to turn ON/OFF Anonymous Mode when leaving comments and reacting to people’s comments. This encourages class participation and removes the perceived risk of unconscious bias from peers.
Design Process
Understand the problem
01. Prototype created by Microsoft: Microsoft Teams for Education
The Vision
Students should be able to communicate with one another effortlessly without the fear of being scrutinized. We want students to be more engaged during lessons and to be able to ask questions at ease.
The Problem
Right now, MS Teams’ existing platform isn’t flexible enough to accommodate the communication needs of the students and educators. While the platform emulates the existing features many Learning Management Systems offer, it does not empower students to ask questions.
Understanding the User
Everyone in our team has used MS Teams at work, but non of us use it for school. We did some secondary research to learn more from some of the successful predecessors out there in the market: Learn Portal, Slack, Piazza, Discord, Facebook, and Reddit. We also ask each other how we usually learn at school, how we dealt with questions in class, and challenges that we needed to overcome during lessons.
02. Persona study. To better understand our target user: the students.
Key Insights on User Context and Needs:
Multiple Tools & Channels to Use in Class
Students often use many tools in class. Tools and information isn't centralized.
Reliance on Peers
When students have questions, they will ask another student for the answer.
Steep Learning Curve for Unprepared Students
Learning a new topic can be hard. Students don’t often ask questions during a large lecture because they do not come to lectures prepared. They are distracted, bored or timid.
Process Canvas
To understand how I was going to bring undergrad students to this new Microsoft Teams experience, I needed to determine the target audience we want to serve, what their context and needs are. Then I think about what we can build to fulfill those needs. After coming up with a solution, I will define how we would measure the solution’s success.
03. Process Canvas
Once we finished ideation and sketching out our preliminary wireframes, I delve into making our initial mockups. This is where I doubled down on what types of scenarios the students would possibly encounter and learn about this new feature.
Prototype 3rd Iteration
After Hackathon, I was able to output the third iteration of this enhancement on MS Teams.
I led the overall design vision, iterations, user research, and interaction design.
Redesigning the Enhancement
After the Hackathon, I know there’s a lot to improve on our first iteration and I wanted to also work on a project that I was passionate about. I decided to redesign the enhancement as a personal project and set out to do more user research to make the experience even better. I also align the visual design to Microsoft Fluent iOS Style Guide so that the experience is coherent to Microsoft Team’s design system.
Desktop and Mobile Prototype
A walkthrough of MS Team's new features to help students freely ask/answer questions in their own time.
Simple Popover to Introduce New Feature
Use a simple tutorial to encourage students to post their first question and start engaging with their professor.
More Peer-to-Peer Engagement
Students are able to help other students while gaining participation points if the comments are meaningful. Instructors can approve the answer, which saves class time and helps prioritization.
Giving and Reacting Comments Anonymously
Leveraging existing MS Teams reaction feature. People can anonymously react to other people’s comments.
Professor can Address Student Questions and See Their Identity
Instructors can address student questions and answers in real time directly onto course materials and see the identity of people on Anonymous Mode. It is to prevent trolling on the platform.
