Caleo

A digital learning platform with the key feature of letting students set custom meanings to highlighters and build the habit of active reading.

Problem Space

Education
Learning Tools

Duration

4 Weeks

Project Type

Individual

Skills

UX Research
UX Design

THE PROBLEM

Academic readings are often too dense, inhibit learning and prevent meaningful takeaways.

As a new graduate student, I personally struggled with gathering the takeaways out of the dense academic readings that were assigned as part of class. I found it hard to find a balance between completing the work, not spending too much time and finding the meaning within. From talking to other students, I found out that this was a shared opinion in many cases.

Hence, I took this up as a personal project to help students deal with the challenge of reading in an academic setting. My goals for this project were to explore the space and come up with a solution to help students improve their reading skills and be able to find what is useful to them as an individual or a practitioner.

DESIGN OUTCOME

Caleo is a digital platform where students can access academic literature relevant to their curriculum. It’s key feature is giving students the ability to set custom meanings to highlighters. This will help students build the habit of looking for what is relevant or meaningful to them, thus becoming more active readers and carry that skill forward.

In this project, I’ve conducted research to explore ways of improving this experience and training students to find what is useful to them as an individual or a practitioner. The research conducted has also led to the design of CALEO (Latin for ‘Highlight’), a digital platform (or LMS) and learning tool for educational institutions.

Using CALEO, teaching faculty can upload academic readings for students to access and read. CALEO’s key feature is that students will have the capability to customize highlighter colors with a specific meaning. This is to train students to develop a habit of active reading which can be beneficial to them long term. Additionally, CALEO also acts as a space where students can easily and more efficiently manage all their academic reading content. CALEO also has a feedback feature by which students can leave feedback or reflections on the impact of a reading. This is to help teaching faculty better curate content that is helpful to students and improve their experience.

ASSUMPTIONS

I started this project by listing out some of my own pain points and assumptions surrounding academic readings.

Academic literature is typically targeted at conferences and symposiums. Hence, the language can sometimes be dense and hard to follow, especially for a diverse set of students with different backgrounds, strengths and interests.
Spending too much time on an academic reading without making much progress can lead to rushing through it last minute or even skipping the reading altogether. This is turn leads to missing out on discussions and key learnings in class
The current process is such that academic readings are uploaded as PDFs into a Learning Management System (LMS) and students are expected to download the files and keep track of it during the semester. This is not really an efficient method for managing them and students end up deleting the material at some point without any way to revisit them.

PROCESS OVERVIEW

For this project, since I started out with a set of generated assumptions that I hoped to validate as I worked towards my final design, I felt it made sense to follow the double diamond design process. This also helped ensure that I had a structure in place to facilitate the conceptualization of a carefully thought out product.

I was able to conduct both primary and secondary research in the exploratory design space and then converge those insights to generate a set of design goals that I used to produce concept sketches. Once I decided on a concept I felt strongly about, I wireframed and designed a working prototype.

In retrospect, I wish I had the time to incorporate some in-depth user testing into my process, however I could not and only used rough feedback from my peers for future refinements.

RESEARCH METHODS

Academic Readings Survey

Survey deployed to Graduate Students at Indiana University
I used a combination of simple data collecting questions and a few open ended response fields to understand student feelings and pain points surrounding academic reading. The survey was answered by 16 students.

Interview with Jeff

Interview with an Instructor at Indiana University
I interviewed Dr. Jeffrey Bardzell who teaches students at both the undergraduate and graduate level at IU. The interview questions were semi structured and were mainly about understanding what an instructor expects for students to takeaway from the material.

Academic Readings Exemplars

Exemplar Analysis of Related Products
I searched and looked for existing technology based tools that were used by people to make reading more comprehensible. I made a collection of a small set of tools to use as inspiration while generating concepts.

KEY INSIGHTS

From the survey that was answered by a total of 16 graduate students, I learnt that:

The insights obtained from the survey helped validate my assumptions on how it’s the language and the denseness of text that makes reading especially challenging. It also revealed that there is a disparity in student’s motivation for reading. While a number of them wanted to expand their knowledge, many reported that they read to keep up with class and because they “had” to.

This pushed me to explore and find out what an instructor or faculty member hoped for their students while assigning different reading material to them. So I then interviewed Dr. Jeffrey Bardzell, who is the HCI/d Program Director as well as teaching faculty for both undergraduate and graduate students at IU.

My interview with him gave me the following insights:

Getting the gist

A reading allows students to do a technique that they couldn’t do before. A reading allows them to look at design, interfaces, interactions, users, stakeholders differently. So sometimes, being a good reader is understanding the essence, the main points or a summary of the literature.

“Being a good reader is getting the gist of it”

Finding what matters to you

According to Dr. Bardzell, there are 2 different types of reading. The first is where the purpose is to understand and get an internal, mental representation. The second is a more personal kind of reading. Mainly, the idea of what purposes do you as an individual at this moment in time hope to get?

“I might forget 99% but that 1% I would remember. I read that book to find that one paragraph”

Becoming an Active Reader

Professors want students to become Active Readers. This means developing the skill to find what is meaningful to them as a person or practitioner in a minimal amount of time.

“Find the part that you want to read slowly, fast”

Providing feedback

Professors would like to have more input directly from students on whether a reading or book worked for them. This would greatly aid professors curate a better set of literature that can be more valuable or educational to students.

“I like students to give feedback or a reaction. I would love for you to say - This paper changed me.”

Lastly, from my analysis of existing tools that are accessible to students and readers in general, I had the following takeaways:

A clean and consistent layout makes reading easier even if its lengthy
Looking at what other people highlighted is very useful to find important content and is also a great way to skim through the reading
Complicated engines that translate and rearrange words are beneficial but may not be practical for a school to incorporate into their system or existing LMS

SYNTHESIS

Based on the insights I collected from the survey and interview, I created two User Personas.

Creating Personas helped me assign a sense of character to the different possible user groups and empathize with them more. It also shed light on what should be some of the core features of my design. I also feel it’s important here to distinguish students as the primary persona because ultimately they will be using the design more and will also be most impacted by it. That being said, having both personas were helpful to me because I feel it created a good balance of features that is feasible and could potentially be adapted by an educational institution.

PROBLEM FRAMING

Graduate students make the decision to return to school because they have a deep desire to learn, improve their skills and further their career. Academic reading is a key component of graduate school because they contain meaningful knowledge that can be applied exceptionally well when properly understood.

Students struggle to read and comprehend academic readings because they are not used to such reading and find the text to be dense and indirect. Professors recommend or desire that students develop active reading skills so that they are able to quickly grasp the meaning behind the text without spending too much time.

So, how might we optimize the student reading experience and cultivate the habit of active reading for long term benefits?

DESIGN GOALS

Encourage the habit of connecting content with relevant meanings so that students find it easier to read actively and find what matters to them.

Be able to use design to train students for long term benefits instead of a quick fix.

Give Professors or Academic Institutions more visibility on which readings are working and leave more impact on the student.

IDEATION, WIREFRAMING & PROTOTYPING

By this point, I had a concrete set of goals and considerations to carry forward and into my final design. Regarding the form of the design, I had already made the decision (during the research phase) to go with an LMS or some sort of digital platform that can be accessible to students and faculty as well as be smoothly integrated into the existing workflow.

During ideation, I sketched out ideas of features that can be incorporated into an LMS.

Some of my early ideas were:

An immersive reading room where users can see each other live and engage in discussions
The capability to set a meaning to your highlighter. For example: Technical definition, argument, method etc.
A “key”or hint feature that can reveal the most highlighted content and how many people highlighted it (inspired by medium)
A “skim” feature for quick reading that shows only the most relevant content
A virtual learning assistant
Instructor created learning or flash cards

I chose to iterate on the second concept listed above because it is the one that met my design goals the most. It had the scope to encourage active reading and build it as a habit over time. It was also very feasible in terms of implementation for an educational institution.

I wireframed this concept on a whiteboard and during this phase, I incorporated some additional elements from my other ideas as well. This involved seeing popular highlights, feedback and discussion.

Once I had decided and improved on the flow, I designed the screens using Sketch and prototyped it using Invision.

FINAL DESIGN

The final design is Caleo, a digital platform where students can access academic literature relevant to their curriculum. Caleo is latin for “highlight”. I also designed a quick logo to make it more appealing to students. I took inspiration from the name I chose and the key feature of giving students the ability to set custom meanings to highlighters.

Caleo’s features are detailed below:

Please note that the below section contains gifs to display the various interactions. Depending on internet speed, it make take a few additional minutes to load.

Login with University Credentials

Students can choose their university, then enter their university username & password to access their dashboard.

Customized Highlighters

During onboarding, students can add highlighters with preset meanings or custom set a meaning and color. These highlighter options will be available to access on the right toolbar of their account.

Course Readings Dashboard & Toolbar

Once they have logged in, students will be able to access their dashboard which will lay out all their course readings according to syllabus. Students will be able to manage their readings in terms of which ones have been completed and which ones are still to be read. On the right, there is a toolbar which displays profile, settings, discussion and bookmarked content. Also featured are the 3 selected highlighters with an additional multicolored highlighter to reveal what other students have highlighted (i.e, the most highlighted content).

Reading View & Provide Feedback

By clicking on a reading from the dashboard, students can navigate to reading view. Here they can access the various toolbar options to annotate as well as provide feedback about the reading at the very bottom.

Highlight & Reveal Popular Highlights

Students can use the toolbar on the right to highlight selected text and also use the multicolored “reveal” highlighter to see what other students are highlighting. This feature is meant to help students skim more efficiently and not miss out on something that could be relevant to them.

FEEDBACK

I did not get the chance to conduct user testing on this prototype due to time constraints. However, I did get to present it to both students and faculty members and collect feedback that I hope to use to further refine this project.

Overall, I received good feedback with students saying they would love to use this and it would greatly improve their experience. I did get the feedback that the use of colored highlights as a primary feature might not be inclusive enough for someone with color blindness or other forms of visual impairment. I feel this is a valid point and inclusivity is important to me. So I would like to, at some point, look at workarounds for this by researching different color palettes that might be better suited or even look at speech commands as an option.

REFLECTION

This was my first time being solely responsible for a project from start to finish. It was challenging to manage time and come up with a complete prototype . I think what helped me was to follow a process and do every step with a purpose in mind.

I’m also really grateful for the insights that I got from my classmates and professors and I feel like the quality of their sayings really pushed me to produce something better. I also enjoyed working with a problem that I was personally facing — I feel like the learning I got from this project helped me improve my approach to academic readings.

Lastly, this project made me realize that incorporating small human-centered changes to existing systems can have profound, long term benefits in building a different way of thinking or approach.

Credits:
All icons used for creating visuals are taken from flaticons.com. Portrait shot of Dr. Jeffrey Bardzell (section:Research Methods) belongs to Indiana University.

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