About Me

Zirou

Hi! My name is Zirou, I am a junior undergraduate Media student, currently studying at University of California, Berkeley. I’ve worked as a UI designer in Chinese start-up companies and am excited to explore more in the world of UX design.

I’m also a freelance illustrator, graphic designer, competitive debater and English debate coach for foreign English speakers. Critical and logical thinking skills gained from prior debating and coaching experience combined with digital design skills, grounded my passion to create visually pleasant user interfaces as well as smooth and enjoyable user experience. I enjoy learning about new perspectives through UX research, trying out different possibilities in rapid prototyping, and optimizing my product by getting invaluable feedbacks. It’s an interesting path of understanding the world, the people, and a self-actualizing journey to make the world a better place.

My Design Manifesto

My design philosophy can be summarized with 5 keywords:

Minimalism: Less is more

Less is more. The philosophy of minimalism applies to interface design, interaction design, and the whole process of user experience ideation. In terms of interface and interaction design, minimalism has been in trend since early 2010s and is a good practice as it simplifies the elements. In terms of feature design and ideation, often times we want to add as many features as possible to solve one problem or try to solve as many problems as possible, eventually ended up with not having any focus therefore failed to provide an effective solution. Rather, I now learn to minimize the features to absolutely necessary for solving problem while maintaining a good user experience.

Communication: Listen and Understanding user’s need

Understanding is the key. During need-finding, we sometimes insert our preconception of what users are like, what they need, and how we can solve the problem we identified, while all of them can be totally wrong! This is why we need to communicate with users and do honest Need-finding in order to understand user’s need. Need-finding is not throwing a question and expecting interviewee to answer as expected, but trying to understand what their life is like around this issue and their deeper need. Reminding myself all the time not to make up problems or solutions for users is one of the most important things for me in need-finding.

Figuration: User-Oriented affordance 

Every user has their own way of using the product in order to fit their distinct needs. Affordance of product should be highly fluid so users can customize the product and find the best fit for them. For example, in the need-finding process of an app that helps instructors optimize their class, we found some of the professors want students to ask questions anonymously while others don’t, so we designed a toggle to allow instructors make their own choices. A good product should be flexible and cater to different needs, making the affordance user-oriented.

Respect: Heuristic Evaluation

Sometimes when we design a product we can be inconsiderate of all the actions users need to make and blocks they might bump into, or sometimes we even create problems for users without realizing. In a project I worked on, the number of clicks needed doubled because of a simple mistake, lacking the “go back” button. This is why we need to do heuristic evaluation in order to protect users right of correcting mistakes, making choices, being fully informed etc, in order to make a responsible and functionable product.

Reiteration: Rapid prototyping and allowing imperfections

Rapid prototyping is one of the most important factor in UX design. In earlier projects, I used to make the mistake of attempting to perfect every prototype and ended up with something less of a testable prototype but more of a demo. This decrease efficiency in finding users to test my prototype and prevented me to gain feedback for actual improvement. In my later projects I corrected this mindset and learned to make lo-fi prototype intended to answer very specific questions, then quickly gained feedback from usability testing to work my product towards users’ needs. Design is a process and we can’t expect a product to be finished in one go, it has to be lots of rapid prototyping and reiteration, learning from imperfections and users to make a product better.

 

Design Doc:

Design for Iteration: Large College-Level Courses

Introduction

Every year, class sizes at large universities increase. For example, this Fall, UC Berkeley’s very own introductory course CS 61A exceeded 2,000 students enrolled, making it one of the largest beginner computer science classes in the world. Teaching and facilitating such large classes, though, also has its drawbacks and difficulties. As a group, we interviewed both student teaching assistants (TA’s), graduate student instructors (GSI’s), and professors for college-level classes with over 300 students. We then tested out 2 of our prototypes made from the previous need-finding module in our INFO 213 class and iterated based on our user’s feedback.

 

Needfinding

We set 3 specific questions for need-finding and improving our prototype design:

  • What kind of data would help TA improve their sessions?
  • Would it be better to collect the data before sessions, during sessions or after sessions?
  • Would it be better to keep students anonymous or not?

After interviewing 6 Teaching Assistants and 3 Professors at UC Berkeley we found a few insights that helped us pivot while including some of the features users liked in our prototypes from the previous module:

1:1 Interview Insights:

  1. TA’s cannot gauge the class while teaching
  2. Students don’t voice their issues
  3. Professors do not want anonymous feedback because it discourages a personal connection with the professor
  4. Would like feedback in more than once a semester as getting feedback at the end of the semester is too late to improve
  5. She feels like it is very important for the student to feel like they are in a safe space to want to participate and tell the professor if they do or do not understand the lecture content
  6. Students feel stressed when using Piazza, therefore, do not want to use it, results in a lack of interaction

Dashboard of Piazza:a website created for students to ask questions about coarse material

Initial Prototype Testing Insights:

  1. TA’s wanted to have an interface to help them guide the section
  2. The achievement bar on top was too cluttered
  3. Real-time understanding does not reflect the students learning process as it’s natural for students to be confused before understanding content

After considering both insights from 1:1s and testing we found our interviewee’s needs, we discovered a general consensus amongst all our subjects that there needs to be a method for testing the knowledge of students in a safe space where they won’t feel like an outcast. We specifically chose the word “communication” to convey an open-ended-ness of what exactly was being communicated previously but we have now converged to the communication being about the content of the lecture.

First Iteration of Student-Facing Prototype

Target User Group

Our current user groups are split into 2 groups:

We defined our user groups to be Students and TAs as our solution is for the communication of these 2 groups and therefore they would both use this app.

How Might We Question

Original HMW Question:How might we streamline communication between instructors/facilitators and students?

After our need finding and research synthesis we flared and eventually focused until we reframed our HMW question.

Reframed HMW Question:How might we use technology to help TAs get a better sense of student’s understanding during sections?

Low-Fi Prototype

Student Facing Lo-Fi Prototype
Sketches of the interaction of Student and TA prototype

Mood Board For Student App

Hi-Fi Prototype

  • Problem 1: Which would be less obstructive? Collecting data before session, during, or after?
  • Problem 2: How can we destress students and incentivize them to participate more?
  • Problem 3: How can we cater to different professors’ preferences?
  • Problem 4: What are the most helpful data? How can we better present analytical data that’s easy to understand?

Simplified Student Facing Interface

TA Facing Interface

https://www.figma.com/proto/G86cNODW1t2a7pD5gU8ett/GUI?node-id=6%3A7326&viewport=-710%2C-616%2C0.6397364139556885&scaling=min-zoom

 

Constraints of the Design Space

The technology that we developed should be very easy and intuitive to use following the common design practices because we must ensure that students attention doesn’t shift to using their phone instead of paying attention or take too much of their time to provide the feedback in a way that interferes with the learning process

In order to ensure that feedback isn’t constitutive, we must prevent dishonest feedback. Therefore feedback cannot be anonymous and we have to collect some personal information about the students. This is a data privacy concern/constraint from the TA’s and student’s perspective if TA’s or students have their performance logged in some way in the app.

Different professors and TA’s have different teaching styles. We tried to account for this but sometimes having many options introduces complexity to the intuitive usability of the interface.

User Testing

  • Make the app lecture content or discussion specific. For example tie the sampling Time to based on the feedback at the end of each question and not based on a time interval
  • Add a section where lost students or students who fall behind can read solution or watch solution video to not feel like their time was worthless and they are lost.
  • Add functionality where students who are asking questions can reference. Students forget the question that were asked or want to easy way to refer to them

 

Next Steps

  • Because of time constraints, we weren’t able to test the prototype in a live section so we want to test this prototype in a section.
  • Make the look and feel of both sides seem more coherent. The 2 different sides were made by separate subteams in the team and therefore have a different look and feel to them so we would come to a conclusion about a universal color scheme that would work for both sides.

 

Reflections

Everyone has a bucket, and it represents their own feelings of confidence and self-esteem. Some people have bucket that’s more full, some people have buckets that are more empty. And people that have a bucket that’s empty, sometimes think that the way they can fill their bucket, is from taking from other people’s buckets. So they fill their own bucket of self-esteem by taking away other people’s confidence and self-esteem. And it’s unhealthy — you can’t fill your bucket by taking away someone else’s bucket. Really the way you fill your bucket is you try to fill other people’s buckets, and your bucket gets filled along the way.

The quote above was from one of our professor interviewee in need-finding process. He mentioned that many times the reason why many students are unwilling to communicate or cooperate roots from their deepest insecurity, instead of lack of institutional support. From here, we were inspired to use a less obstructive way in order to collect student study data and optimize teaching, which is what I think we did well and should continue on, think outside the box to touch the pain-point.

Realistically speaking, it would be immensely helpful if we had time to do more user testing and reiterate based on the feedbacks. Design is a journey and as long as you’re coming from a place of passion, care for others and an urge to make the world a better place by problem-solving, you will eventually find the way.