New Gallery View - Collaborate
My Role
User Experience / Product Designer
Deliverables
Research document, Figma mockup, Components library
Tools
Figma, User Testing
Use case
Enhance the current video gallery to allow instructors to watch and monitor the video of all the students in the virtual classroom. As well, students need to see their peers for better online engagement.
Challenges
Upgrade current video gallery capabilities.
Enhance users experience according to new online learning/teaching needs.
Improve overall user experience to increase online engagement.
Understanding the problem
Based on previous user feedback from institutions enrolled in Blackboard Collaborate (now part of Class), we explored several ideas to find the best approach to address the primary needs.
Design prototypes were created to present users with four main tasks to perform during user testing with instructors and students around the world to understand the impact of all the new features we were proposing on our product.
Main goal on this phase:
Pinpoint usability issues within the interface.
Identify what expectations users have about the product.
Identify problematic patterns within the enhancements.
Add new feature that benefit end-users.
Understand the new needs of users arising from the Covid 19 lockdown.
Understand the new online and remote teaching and learning scenarios.
Exploring and creating
Taking all of these findings and insights into consideration, we broke down the features into multiple milestones for development and end-user delivery.
We kept an eye on ensuring accessibility compliance with respect to the tool users will use when building a hotspot question type.
Definition of development and delivery milestones.
Accessibility compliance:
Extended view on mobile devices.
Annotations to guide developers.
Takeaways
Overall, we have received very positive feedback about the improvements to Blackboard Collaborate as a conferencing teaching tool. Users' initial expectations, especially for the gallery view layout, have been met with these improvements.
In addition, we have different layout preferences depending on the primary use/need during live sessions, and we can find a way to meet each need without creating a lot of layouts. And last but not least, we have to keep an eye on additional needs expressed by users, which can be powerful enhancements in the future.
