UX Research & Design: Canvas
Class
Project Type
Exploratory Research
Product Design
Project Type
Individual
Canvas is a Learning Management System (LMS) used at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as other educational institutes.
Despite its leading position in the market, Canvas still has room for improvement.
In a 7-week long group project, my team and I are tasked with identifying opportunities, testing product concepts, and creating a low-fidelity prototype.
We found 4 key insights from the research.
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Swiss Army knives syndrome: Canvas has many great features already but students and professors have trouble locating those features and content.
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The quicker, the better: People don't want to use Canvas but they have to, so they want to spend as little time as possible on the platform.
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No uniformity: People want to see different things. Some only want to see the upcoming assignments while some want to see the syllabus and calendar.
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Spark joy?: Students and professors don't expect enjoyment from using Canvas but some delights - such as the celebratory confetti after the assignment is submitted - are welcomed.
To address the problem “how might we reduce mental fatigue and increase delight for Canvas users?”, we proposed a personalized modular dashboard that people can customize their own Canvas home page to see what's important to them.
My role: as this project is for an educational purpose, every team member is encouraged to collaborate and hone different skill sets throughout the process. Everyone conducted user research, domain research, proposed solutions, designed product concept, and prototyped. As for the final output, the team divided the work into 2 workstreams: the presentation and the prototype. I was responsible for setting the storyline of the presentation, curating the information, and creating the presentation slides with 2 collaborators. The user interface was designed by the other workstream collaborators.
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For more details, please reach out to pannida.th@gmail.com