how might we improve the digital reading experience?
One of the largest opportunities and challenges we have in creating a meaningful digital student experience is that currently the physical reading experience is still preferred. A strong argument could be made that one of the reasons for this is because the digital reading experience is just a facsimile of the physical experience, without the tactile or emotional connection. In this project, we endeavored to explore that problem.
My role: Workshop facilitation, Design sprint management, UX direction, concept design and wireframes
Diary Studies
Once we all agreed on the problem, our research team set out to conduct diary studies with college students. We identified the key findings:
Students use landmarks to navigate a book, this can be a picture, a page number, a note they left. This is harder to accomplish in Digital
Students lose focus reading long portions online
Students are less likely to memorize with digital notes.
Rapid Iteration
I led a workshop to think through these problems. Based on our selected persona (The busy adult student, who frequently must multitask) we conducted rapid iterations on our selected areas of focus. Those areas were:
Sense of place and quick scan
Progress and preparation
Study activities and memorization
Prioritization and voting
Once we iterated on different approaches to our areas of focus, we discussed and voted. All three priorities were important, but we chose Sense of place and quick scan as our first area of focus.
Over the next two months we conducted a design sprint, following the schedule above. We designed in two week sprints, the first week being more conceptual, the second week being more focused. We managed this through constant collaboration and communication, both in our war room, but also on Slack as our team is split across the US. In this process we discovered and honed in on our solution: The Content Strip.
The content strip is a solution that allows the user to see all pages of a chapter in slight drawer. The user can enlarge the drawer so that images, videos, pg numbers etc. are clear. The user can then flip between these multiple locations
Since we tested weekly, we had the flexibility to try an assortment of testing approaches. We began with paper prototypes and allowed the student participants to scribble corrections on our designs. It was super cool.
Paper Prototyping
Designs
The drawer is triggered from the floating CTA in the margin
It defaults to quick scan nav mode
The content strip magnified.