Piazza Usability Evaluation

Transcript

1. Piazza Usability Portfolio Conducted by - Ruchira Kapoor
2. Contents 1. Introduction 2. Surveys 3. Interviews 4. Persona 5. Usability Tests 6. Heuristic Evaluation 7. Journey Map 8. Lessons Learned
3. 1. Introduction What is Piazza? Why Piazza?
4. Piazza A Learning Management System
5. What is Piazza? • Piazza is an online site where students can ask and answer questions 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. • Piazza was founded by Pooja Sankar in 2009, while she was a student in Stanford’s business school, and launched in 2011. • It is an online study network, which works something like a hybrid between a wiki and a discussion board. • In addition, Piazza provides the ability to host polls, post class resources, syllabi and other helpful information.
6. Why Piazza? • The primary goal of the project is to determine how well both instructors and students understand the function of Piazza and whether there are any issues with its usability. • We wanted to find out whether or not students and instructors saw any advantages to using Piazza as compared to the more traditional threaded discussion forums or learning management systems.
7. 2. Surveys
8. Types of Users • Total of 22 responses were recorded for users who have used Piazza • Students – 18 Teaching Assistant – 4 Professors – 0 • Carnegie Mellon University – 2 University of Maryland – 19 New York University – 1 • International Student – 20 Domestic Student – 2
9. Types of Users
10. Satisfaction
11. Piazza Usage
12. Challenges • The pain point indicated by the most users is the usability and navigation of Piazza • Second most challenging feature is course content • Not many people seem to have a problem with login/access and technical tools
13. Resolving Doubts
14. Recommend Piazza? • Surprisingly many users have voted yes when asked if they would recommend Piazza to anyone • Majority of the users have voted for maybe as they believe that Piazza has good features but bad usability and navigation
15. 3. Interviews
16. Interview Insights Student (Technical) • Likes the student- answer section to clear doubts. • Feels that the search function could be better. • Satisfied with the current features. Student (Non- Technical) • The UI is confusing, not intuitive, and time consuming. • Functionality and features are decent. • Likes- anonymity of students. Teaching Assistant • Easy to use, great readability. • Very active student discussion section. • Would like the ability to allow submissions and grading as well.
17. 4. Persona
19. 5. Usability Tests
20. Tasks Task 1 Create a new poll anonymously in a specific folder. The poll should be open for a week to vote. The results should be available to the student after the poll closes. Task 2 Find posts based on keyword searches Task 3 Can you easily determine which posts are notes and which ones are questions. Can you tell which questions have been answered by only students, instructors or both just by looking at the posts. Task 4 Create a student answer. Edit a single student answer wiki style. Post a follow-up discussion Task 5 Find endorsed questions
21. Results • Highly competent when it comes to readability and navigation. • Basics tasks like adding a post or creating a student answer were fairly easy for the users. • Difficulty when it comes to performing in depth specific tasks like finding endorsed questions or editing a single student answer.
22. 6. Heuristic Evaluation
23. Key Points • Used Jacob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for UI Design • Usability issues that need to be addressed 1. Simplify the layout of the site by reducing the clutter 2. Make functionality easier to find 3. Simplify the learning curve 4. Make the site more intuitive
24. 7. Journey Map
26. 8. Lessons Learned
27. “ Overall trend observed was a dissatisfaction with the usability and navigation and satisfaction with the tools and features
28. Next time? • We could recruit one of the main type of user- Professors. Next time, we would change the strategy to recruit participants for the user studies. • Since you need to join a class in order to use Piazza, it restricted the new users and the scope of the study. • Conduct the study comparing it to another LMS tool. This can be achieved by performing AB testing on one class for a course.
29. 29 Thank You Any questions?