Blackboard Inline Interactions
Add a feature case study
Blackboard is a Learning Management System that is used at many institutions. A popular request in Blackboard community is to add a feature that allows instructors to ask questions inline with the material to gain insight from learners.
Currently the only way to get this type of data would be to have the students email the instructor in an online course or for the instructor to set up a survey. The ability to add interaction inline would help streamline the student experience when instructors are asking for feedback, questions, or having students do metacognition exercises.
This design used the existing Blackboard Learn 9.1 layout. I designed the the inline interactions and worked with users to test the prototype to make data informed changes to the design.
CLIENT
Based on Anthology Blackboard’s Parent company. This project was done with no affiliation to the company
ROLE
Product Design + UI
TIMELINE
8 weeks, 10 hours/week
PLATFORM
Desktop web LMS version
DELIVERABLES
User Interviews
Product Flow
Sketches
Mid-Fi Wireframes
Prototype
Usability Testing
High Fidelity Prototype
Research
I began by interviewing different Blackboard users to start thinking about what types of interaction they were looking for and to better understand how this would be used by instructors and Students. After the interviews I used Figjam to add the comments and then grouped the comments. One of the groupings was for the Ideas and this brought about specific thoughts on the interactions.
The user interviews ideas grouping helped to focus on what was needed but I needed to break these down into what ideas to tackle, thus a feature map
After the preliminary user research, I began by looking at the direct and indirect competitors to blackboard. I was looking at types of interactions these products have. This also helped to start thinking about the types of users.
The preliminary research and user interviews helped determine the primary persona.
defining the product
With the research completed, the next step was determining the overall design of the interactions and how they will be implemented in the design. A storyboard was created to help visualize how instructors would create a survey, students would take the survey, and instructors would gather feedback. This helped me visualize the current process in an effort to streamline the inline interactions.
Students have to go through 8 pages to take a survey, our goal is to make sure they don’t have to leave their current page.
This lead me to focus in the inline interactions 3 steps (Instructor creates Inline Interactions, Students complete Inline Interactions, Instructor views the interactions) and task and user flows were created.
Task Flow was created based on how an instructor would add an interaction to a Blackboard item.
Userflow expanded the task flow and included:
1. Instructor adding the Blackboard Interaction
2. Student completing the Interaction
3. Instructor viewing the Interaction results
design
Sketches were created to help understand how the inline interaction would work, the instructor experience, the student experience, and the overall flow. Since this product is based on Blackboard Learn 9.1, a Mid-Fi wireframe was created using screenshots form Blackboard. This was the backbone for the prototype to help determine issues before creating the Hi-Fi Prototype. At this time, I also created a style tile to help with a consistent design.
Sketches help flesh out the design and flow.
Mid-Fi Wireframe which eventually became the prototype
The Style Tile was created to help with design consistency moving forward.
usability testing
The Mid-Fi wireframes were used to create the prototype that I ran 5 users through. 3 of the users were Instructors and 2 were students. The users went through the prototype either in person or via teams. After the interviews, their comments were added to a figjam board and then grouped by themes. The ideas were also split into easy and harder changes to make to help determine the feasibility of changes.
Hi-fi prototype
Because the Mid-Fi prototype used screenshots, some time was taken to create all of the Blackboard components in Figma. I was creating the Blackboard components and integrating the changes from the user testing at the same time.
Hi-Fi Screenshots
final thoughts
Adding a feature to an existing learning management system has a lot of challenges, especially when working without a design system. Working alone, it is easy for scope creep to become a challenge to manage as it is fun thinking about many different possibilities.