Designing “Tech for Good” at Hilma.
UX design and research for a joint project between Hilma and the Israel Audiobook Project
TL;DR My process for designing a Hebrew language audiobook app aimed at empowering youth with reading disabilities. I based my gamification techniques on real life library incentive programs. I was also tasked with designing a website for the teacher dashboards. This required a lot of customer research to define what information would be useful to the teachers.
Rashi Kuhl (our client) is trying to empower Israeli children with reading disabilities. To do this he is utilizing the power of audiobooks (a tried and tested technique in the USA).
Rashi’s vision: Rashi would like a simple UI to make it easy for children to access the audiobooks, as well as incentives through gamification. Rashi would also like to use dashboards so that both the teachers and their students themselves have access to the stats. The solution must also follow accessibility standards.
We will be drawing from audiobooks in the “library for the blind”s library and therefore every student has to be eligible, according to their guidelines. This means that the teachers can’t legally access the books, they would have to use one of their students accounts, in order to listen to the books in the classroom.
The Process
Rashi and I had a brief chat about the different categories of students who are legally eligible to use the audiobooks. After which, I was allowed to listen in as he presented his initiative to a group of students. I was not allowed to question the student directly, but gathered some useful information nonetheless.
Takeaways:
- In this class there were 9 kids
- Only 5 have smartphones that they can bring to school
- Out of the 9, only 2 enjoy reading
- Kids say they are used to watching videos, but listening to stories without something visual was foreign to them
- After being exposed to audiobooks, these students agreed with each other that it’s easier than reading.
- In class, they use a paper scoreboard to keep track of the students “scores” and audiobook listening progress.
I requested to meet with a focus group of teachers and for him to send me all the websites that had inspired him.
Rashi and I met a focus group of 5 teachers who are using his current model.
Some of my Q&A takeaways:
Quotes from teachers:
“I want it to help my students learn to read.”
I want to give my students the feeling that books are accessible to them.
I want to expose my English speaking students to Israeli culture.
Other issues they are worried about:
- Teachers have a lot of demands on their time and aren’t sure that a dashboard will be worth the time investment for them.
- The students are not all computer savvy (some have trouble using a mouse but they ARE comfortable on smartphones).
- The parents are not involved in their children's school life.
- The parents are unresponsive to teachers.
- Not all the kids have computers at home (some for financial reasons)
- Students are not used to the idea of being read to.
- The teachers are split 50/50 on whether a desktop or mobile is easier.
- The students are motivated in class, but don’t enjoy listening to audiobooks at home.
- The kids had a very hard time understanding that they can LISTEN to stories (as opposed to watching them).
- Most of the kids are motivated in cross class competitions, but some of the teachers are apprehensive about creating that environment due to previous negative experiences. The teachers are also hesitant to create competitions where some students have an unfair advantage.
Questionnaire:
I started writing a questionnaire for the teachers and learning from previous mistakes I had made, I used a Likert scale for the multiple choice questions.
1. How comfortable are you with your computer/smartphone (you may pick more than one)
a. I am not very comfortable with computers.
b. I am very comfortable with computers.
c. I know many advanced features in the software I use.
d. I am comfortable learning new software or using new computers.
At this point I started reading up on gamification techniques and library summer incentive programs aimed at increasing literacy in youth.
Technical requirements:
Our engineering team is speaking to the “Library for the Blind” team to figure out what information we will have access to. We also need to find out how their book classification system works.
We also defined the minimum steps that we needed for student registration:
- Student gets an eligibility form.
- Yoetset or psychologist must sign the form.
- Teacher sends the info to the parents who must also sign.
- Teacher gets them back and send them en mass to the library for the blind.
- Teacher sends the password to the parents.
At this point I had a firm understanding of my users and started crafting some artifacts:
User flows:
Flow for the student app:
We decided to go for an app in order to simplify the process for the students.
Flow for the teachers website: The teacher’s side of the experience focuses on curating a “bookshelf” and tracking the student’s improvement.
Interactive prototypes:
It was important for us that our MVP was super simple and straightforward.
I invite you to try out the interactive prototypes for both the student and teacher solutions.
We were about to start designing the visual feel of the MVP, but unfortunately, at this stage of the project (mid March 2020) it was canceled due to the Covid-19 closures.
Thank you for taking the time to read this case study. As always I encourage you to reach out.
