Zoom for Teachers: A UX Design Case Study
By: Srinivas Iyengar
Tags: UX Design, Zoom, Hackathons, Case Study, UI Design

Target Users

We determined that it was wise to tackle this through age groups of students. Since our problem statement mentioned school teachers, we considered only schools as our focus. All other teaching centres and tuitions were out of the context for us now.

Why did we rule out age group below 13?

Lack of self-motivation and more adult supervision is required

Why did we rule out age group above 17?

Firstly, we had to focus on students from schools. Second, college students are more focused on their work as they have their careers to think about going forward. Even teachers aren’t that concerned in colleges.

So, 13–17 was our focus. They are tech-savvy and mischievous. Therefore, teachers have a tough time controlling them. This is also the age where discipline is a real concern for teachers. The teachers teaching the student of this age group were our primary users now.

User Interview

Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash

We contacted teachers they knew and some via their friends. We also did one interview with a student to understand their perspective. Since we were on a time crunch, we had no time to do a screening and determine who will be our users for the interview. We had to take a shot and honestly, it worked out great. We had some great insights because they all faced issues with zoom. Some of them even moved out of Zoom to other platforms just like our research suggested.

Insights:

Unable to figure out who is asking doubt. They have to always ask who is speaking Never uses breakout-rooms. They were disappointed with the feature and how difficult it was to find it. There is no active discussion most of the teaching is one way Most of the teachers can’t afford graphic or writing tablets to track their thoughts which makes it boring because there are no new insights or scope of new doubts because it’s all in the limited presentations In group discussions, if they are in a breakout-rooms, you can’t look at the students all at once which makes it hard to jump from one to another and then talk to all of them. Cannot share content, media and links easily on Zoom. Faces a lot of problem in maintaining the record for attendance as has to submit the number of present students every day. There is no submission feature for assignments and documents Relies on the family to understand the platform Use Kahoot and Quizlet to attempt interactive quizzes but need 2 devices to stay online and attempt the quiz as well. Doubts have to be mailed to teachers after the class as chat is disabled due to student’s nuisance

Empathy Mapping

We did Empathy mapping to know the user and their perspective. We consolidated our desk research and all the learnings from the interviews into this. This exercise helped us in removing our own perspective and get into the shoes of the user and know their pain points, how they feel, think, what they say, and do while using the product. We made one for both the student and the teacher.

Empathy Map for Teacher

Empathy Map for Student

User Journey

We chose to do User Journey to understand the touchpoints of our users with the app. To be in the users' shoes and understanding each step helped us understand our user’s insights and their gaps and motivations concerning the app.

We only made one map for the teachers because this was we needed to understand. Making one for the student was pointless as that wouldn’t solve anything.