Assisting students in our HCD Tech Lab about producing their user persona
Through September 2019 - April 2020, I have had some unorthodox yet amazing opportunities for someone at my age and level of design experience. Let’s take a step back first: what is this so called Everett Program?
The Everett Program was conceptualized in 1998 by UCSC Sociology students and has 4 classes, spanning over one year where ultimately, students are able to implement a project to help nonprofits through technology. Students who wish to continue to work with Everett after the 3rd class can apply to a fellowship position as there is a shared-governance structure of both staff and undergraduate students (Fellows). If inducted, Fellows have various opportunities and ways to work with other students, staff, and other Fellows to further Everett’s goal: empowering others to utilize systemic thinking for needs based, human centered implementation of technological solutions to create social change locally, nationally, and internationally.
UXR/UXD Class Lecturer
I had the opportunity to speak for a Fellows tech lab. These labs are classes in SOCY 30A dedicated to helping students learn the multitude of technology used today. They are led by select Fellows who have been chosen to speak about a certain topic (computer hardware, coding, website implementation, social media, etc) for about 40 minutes. Myself and another UoT team member were delegated to understanding users (UX design/user research, data collection, analytics, visualisation).
Approaching this lesson, we had a few hurdles to face:
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Keeping someone engaged for a few minutes is feasible, but keeping around 70 students engaged for 40 minutes seemed daunting
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There was a plethora of material to cover. Narrowing down what was important and most pertinent to the students was tedious since at some level, everything seemed relevant and important
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We were young in this field. For me, I have had around 2 - 2.5 years of experience with UX and my partner just became interested in UX Research in early 2019 so we certainly felt the Imposter syndrome
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Maintaining and/or leaving students with some information post lecture.
To combat these issues, we:
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Aimed to make slides digestible and visual. That way, we could be more interactive with the students to keep them engaged
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We brainstormed our topics then categorised them based on a logical progression. We discussed about the history of how these fields came about, what is UXR/UXD, the mindset and workflow of a ‘UXer’, and other topics such as: tools, deliverables in the scope of our project experiences, career opportunities, and the applications of these fields.
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Though we were young and by no means professionals in the field, we had the continued support and motivation of staff and also other Fellows in the program doing the other tech labs
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We broke out into a mini activity that was easy and relevant to the students. As a glimpse of our activity, we asked the students to discuss with others near them about what data Instagram they think would be collected (usage time, account information, location, etc). From there, we asked follow up questions to the class based on their responses (to view the rest of the activity, feel free to view our presentation here)
UXR/UXD ONLINE PRESENTER
I had the amazing opportunity to be part of creating an online version of the SOCY 30A course by being a ‘lecturer’ for one of their lessons. The Everett Program received $90,000 to turn the SOCY 30A course (including our very own Fellow-run tech labs) into an online lecture series where it would be accessible via Canvas for the entire UC school system. The UC system has around 280,000 students so in order to further our reach outside UCSC, we wanted to translate the lectures and labs we presented in class and into a more online accessible version.
Keeping in mind the challenges and solutions tackled when making the original lesson for the in person class, there were more additional problems we faced:
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Since we were tasked to talk about UXR/UXD, we had to revise and edit our original 40 minute lesson and condense it into 10 minutes
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We had to keep this video lecture sustainable since this video will be live for the next 5 years and possibly even longer.
We created a transcript of our lesson to read off the teleprompter, which went through many revisions from both me, the other member, and staff. It even went through a words-to-time conversion calculator to ensure we were not going overtime.
To combat the issues just mentioned, we did the following:
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We removed the topics after our project experience/deliverables (post activity, career opportunities, applications of UXR/UXD) to focus on the general scope of what it means to understand your users. Using visuals to complement our dialogue also helped portray the topics more to create substance.
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We were also trying to keep our information and content relevant now and what would hope to be the same in a few years. We did this by extracting information from our original lecture and made sure that information was constant and would not change too much within the design and research community in the coming years. Language was also edited to make it more broad.
Recording was a blast and the video is going through editing revisions, though after seeing the first draft, we are very proud of it and humbled by the opportunity we have been given. More importantly, we hope the students watching our foundational video will find it informative and will use the knowledge to help create better decisions and products to better social justice and their community.
The video is currently going through edits and will be uploaded when ready
HCD Tech Lab Instructor
In February 2020, I was given another opportunity to help teach and lead the human centered design tech lab for 16 students with 8 various projects over a 4 week period. These projects and students needed to implement some form of a website to help their nonprofit partner organization.
In order to navigate the multitude of media, meaning, and possibilities that exist, we practiced flexible creativity for pragmatic steps towards real social change. Within this framework we applied a broad understanding of design principles and perspectives on social issues and project planning to strategically aggregate knowledge & information effectively.
Student Learning Objectives:
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Understand basic human centered design principles
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Foster students’ strategies and approaches of using tech in the context of social change or non-profit work
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Understand complete process and steps involved in web design
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Equip students to be able to use necessary tools (software) for their project implementation
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Train students’ problem-solving skills to use tech for real-life social issues via various case studies or applied exercises
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Connect design to real life contexts
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Learn basics of various design tool applications (Canva, Illustrator, Figma, etc)
You can see our final course outline (adjustments were made for reasons explained later)
Week 5 (Feb 6)
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Intro to HCD
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Intro everyone, associated teams, roles, past relevant exp
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Pre survey on how comfy they are in tech/web/design
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Brief overview of HCD and design processes - UX, UI, IA
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Breakout 1 & Assignment 1 - Basic User Persona
Week 6 (Feb 13)
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Online Assignment (Lab Cancelled Due to Strike)
Week 7 (Feb 20)
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Intro to Design
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Good design vs Bad designs (with examples)
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Wireframing & Prototyping 101
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Show our project as examples
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Intro to Figma
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Hands on with prototyping/wireframe software
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Breakout 2 & Assignment 2 - Wireframes (1st draft)
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Hands on with graphic design tools
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Canva, Illustrator, Photoshop
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Week 8 (Feb 27)
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Intro to WCMS
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Hands on with CMS softwares
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Begin with project tech implementation
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Post survey
Challenges
Our second tech lab (Week 6) had to be moved to an online assignment as a replacement due to university strikes, thus preventing access to campus. In addition, the Everett Program was in solidarity with the strikers and wanted to support their cause.
Although having an in-person lab would’ve been better, we still assigned the students to look into the COLA strikes website, https://payusmoreucsc.com/ (their site has since been updated) and write up a half page critical reflection on the effectiveness of their information architecture and design (taking note of their use of color and space along with the page to page continuity) with any suggestions for how you would improve it.
The strike felt like it brought down team as well as my own personal morale as being separated from our students made it harder to connect with and teach them, but we still had to push on and continue our lab.
Results
In the end, it was all worth it as our students really benefited from this lab and we saw people utilizing the lessons taught when doing their assignments. For people with zero to minimal design experience and with the ongoing strike that was occurring, the students made strides in their designs, methodology, and confidence for approaching their projects.
Quantitatively, we also saw the effects of this lab had on our students. Overall, there was a 21% increase in general design confidence and familiarity from our students for them to incorporate into their tech project. For example, 81% of students felt more comfortable with basic WCMS (Wordpress, Wix, Google Sites).
Here is what some students had to say about the lab!
“This lab was super beneficial because we're using Wix. It gave me the push and confidence to mess around with Wix. We were taught to sketch out our ideas and to play around to really get a sense of what we're working with and it was honestly the most helpful. I gained comfortability, confidence, and was less stressed out/nervous for my project.”
