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.
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
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.
DELIVERABLES
User Interviews
Product Flow
Sketches
Mid-Fi Wireframes
Prototype
Usability Testing
High Fidelity Prototype
The Challenge
I wanted to create a simple, easy to navigate experience that is similar to the visual experience in Blackboard Learn 9.1 so that they would have a seamless experience. The challenge was having the seamless user experience with a new feature that does something that Blackboard currently does not have, which is inline data collection.
Another challenge is that there are 2 main sets of users, the instructor and student. The primary user is the instructor since they add the interactions and benefit from the data collection. The design took this into consideration and created the student interface as well for the main questions types to help create a seamless flow.
The biggest challenge was determining what was needed the most and to acknowledge scope creep.
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 research was looked over and a research findings document was created.
The Problem
I wanted to create a simple, easy to navigate experience that is similar to the visual experience in Blackboard Learn 9.1 so that they would have a seamless experience. The challenge was having the seamless user experience with a new feature that does something that Blackboard currently does not have, which is inline data collection.
Another challenge is that there are 2 main sets of users, the instructor and student. The primary user is the instructor since they add the interactions and benefit from the data collection. The design took this into consideration and created the student interface as well for the main questions types to help create a seamless flow.
The biggest challenge was determining what was needed the most and to acknowledge scope creep.