Course books play a crucial role in universities where students use these books to gain in-depth knowledge of a subject and prepare for their exams. There are many formats in which these books are available such as soft copies like PDFs, ebooks available online, and hard copies available in stores and libraries at different costs.
Acquiring these books presents itself with a few problems which discourage students. To empathize and understand these problems and come up with a solution for them, I conducted interview sessions and decided to come up with a solution following a three-phase design thinking framework.
Surveys and Interviews
Personas, Journey Maps, Wireframes, Architecture
Prototyping, Quantative Testing
Survey
A survey we conducted showed that out of 30 respondents, 27 of them have referred to the printed course books once or more during their studies. Furthermore, majority of the people using the books were freshmen and sophomore students, and most of these books were used for only a small duration and specific courses.
The survey was conduted remotely using google forms.
Interviews
I approached a group of university students for qualitative interviews. Our interviews with students gave us lots of insights which we organized using an affinity diagram below.
We organized our findings using affinity diagram.
Unavailability of books
During interviews, we found out that most students were struggling to obtain course material when needed. The other option for the students was to issue the book from the library but they faced the same issue there as well.
Feeling of being wasteful with money
Upon further inquiry, most of the students in the third and fourth year of their bachelor's program told us that the books they bought in the first year were still with them and that those books were of no use to them and they felt that they wasted their money.
Creating user personas
Qualitative User personas were created based on the students we interviewed. These personas represent a group of qualities that proved to be the foundation for our ideation and design phase.
Brainstorming & ideation
Afterward, I held brainstorming sessions and general interviews with the students to gain their insights on what they thought an optimal solution could be. These ideas were then grouped and an optimal solution was selected that would cater to most if not all the problems we have identified.
Wireframing
Low-fed and Hi-fed wireframes and screen designs of the above-mentioned functions were created in Figma
Quantative usability testing
& end-user acceptance test
To test and verify our solution, we approached our users for moderated testing. Our test included indicators like success rate, completition time, time taken at each section etc.
Key points
1. The measured success for each task adds up to 75% success
rate considering each of the 4 tasks were tested with 10 different users with different level of
digital literacy and prior experience with online stores.
2. While many tasks were completed in 4 seconds or less, there was confusion observed while users were
performing task 3 and task 4 hence resulting in more time taken to complete.
During the whole project, we discovered insights highlighting the market gap as well as a few very crucial needs of students. Even though the project was conducted on a very small scale, we learned several user research, design, and testing techniques involved in creating a good user experience.