The story of designing for a publishing company and high school students
By: Erik Calleberg
Tags: UX, Report, UX Research, UX Design

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The purpose of this practical design project was to create a digital platform for Digilär. Digilär is a part of Natur & Kultur and is currently working to digitize teaching and learning. The purpose of the digital platform was to explore how it is possible to attract university students to use a digital supplement for learning.

The aim of the project was to create a design concept that Digilär could use to create a digital platform for universities and colleges. The project resulted in a data collection with students and teachers and a high-fi prototype that met defined needs. The prototype was developed through various phases and iterations with users and clients. The project was carried out similar to a design thinking process where different phases deal with different parts in the creation of a good design.

Abstract

From our user research, we realized that students do download pirated course literature free even if they say that’s not morally right because it’s easy, free and allows them to access a small part of an expensive book that they otherwise would have to purchase even though they only need a chapter or two. Even a small percentage of teachers posed with a similar survey admitted to have used downloaded course literature to teach their students. The research also suggested that many students didn’t like reading as the best way to learn. They preferred videos, lectures and study questions to assist them. Another insight was that the students also regarded the authors of the course literature as bad representatives of their books and that their hard work never crossed their mind.

The project resulted in a website prototype delivered to Digilär that would offer highschool/university students and teachers a modern way of buying course literature. The prototype was tailored to authors too because the tool offered the authors opportunities to present themselves as ambassadors of their books, add video clips and audio clips of them talking about the books and the work behind it. The new prototype has two different modes, one for logged in profiles and one guest mode. In the logged-in version, the users can see the options of buying select chapters, see videos, listen to audio clips and do study questions of the books they have purchased. The logged-in version of course allows the user to buy the full book, and full access, in both physical print and as e-book/pdf. The guest account however only allows the user to buy the book physically and as pdf but get to “test read” the first chapter of the book.

Introduction

This is a report for the group project with Digilär that is part of the course Advanced Project Course spring term 2020 at Södertörns Högskola for 15 credits and is the last course before the summer break as well as the last course of the first year in Master’s programme. This course started on the 30th of March and spanned all the way to the 6th of June. The text will give you (the reader) insights of the journey of this project. From accepting the mission from the stakeholders to the results and discussion part at the end. The text will contain explanations of our design/method choices, their outcomes, and a discussion session where the group will reflect on the process as a whole.

Background

In January 2021 the book “Yrkesdidaktiska dilemman” will be launched at the publishing house Natur & Kultur along with a provided digital platform for the book. The authors of the book are Janne Kontio and Sofia Lundmark. This platform is the digital platform service Digilär which is owned by Natur & Kultur. The stakeholders from Natur & Kultur are CTO Anna Nordström and publisher Niclas Gårdfeldt. Natur & Kultur is a course book publishing company that publishes and distributes course books from the grades of preschool to highschool and Swedish for immigrants (Natur & Kultur 2020). Digilär is both a platform and an edtech publisher that provides comprehensive, fully digital learning materials (Digilär 2020). This project aim is to develop a structure and design for the platform for the book on the digital platform Digilär, using its resources and possibilities.

The project goals are to create:

• A full structure and design for the digital platform.

•Suitable solutions for video lectures, pods, online courses and other resources.

•Examples of content for the digital platform.

•The design and development of a competitive solution for a digital platform as a supplement for the book.

•An easy to access service for all readers and users of the digital platform.

The target audience for the digital platform for the book are teachers, teacher educators, researchers and academic lecturers, people who can read and understand Swedish.

The results of this project will be delivered as one or several graphical and interactive prototypes/concepts to the stakeholders using Janne and Sofia’s book as an example to present books in our concepts, together with the research we have conducted and used to motivate our design choices. The challenge this project poses is how can we create a digital complement that opens up for new users and to attract more visitors than Digilär does today.

3. Covid-19

Before executing the design process of this project we want to explain how the Coronavirus (Covid-19) affected the project. The Covid-19 which is a virus that rapidly spread throughout the world 2020 forced change. Change in private life as in work. The virus affected the world and made countries and states to establish precautions to not spread the disease. This project was executed in the Stockholm area (April-June 2020) where restrictions were quite mild compared to other parts of the world. People could for instance leave their houses and meet the closest friends and family. The private life was with other words not that affected. The work practice though was more affected by the restrictions. People that had the opportunity to work remotely were restricted to do so. Forcing and affecting the working situation for many people of the urban city of Stockholm.

The initial project was carried out as part of the Advanced Practical Project course in the master’s programme in user-experience. The user-experience work focuses a lot on understanding, gathering, and exploring possible futures, often with users and other respondents close by. Due to Covid-19, UX-design activities as observations, face to face interviews, workshops, and so on were not carried out. The collaborative design normality of working close to group members couldn’t be carried out as well, forcing the overall design work to be remotely executed. Covid-19 required change and affected the way we have carried out this project.

4. Method & Design Process

The design work performed according to the course’s restrictions would mainly be practical, that is, focus on working with design from a practical perspective unlike the otherwise very theoretical work conducted by universities. Therefore, with a framework for the course, a design process-methodology was chosen to carry out the design work. The work was therefore divided into four different phases, where we dealt with different parts of UX design. The phases took the project forward and aimed for the whole idea to concentrate on understanding before the next phase began. By understanding, for example, the target group, the definition could be specified, with a specified definition sketch and prototype work could be performed. The methodology is very similar to the practical methodology of the profession to solve design problems (Design Council, 2020). The choice to present methodology and process, we believe, can more clearly describe where methods are used and to what benefit, and how methodology paved the way for practical design work.

4.1 Planning

The project started with an intensive planning phase where a Gantt chart was created and a project plan was written to outline the time frame of the project. The project was also planned to utilize the agile method SCRUM for structuring work, setting time frames and dividing tasks over weekly sprints (Tonnquist 2009, s.38). To easily conduct sprints and documenting these, a website called Monday.com (Monday, 2020) was initially used, but a sudden paywall made us switch to Trello (Trello, 2020). Monday.com and Trello both are project management websites that allow people to collaborate and create boards for various projects and move daily-sprint cards across them. The project was divided into four major design thinking-inspired phases of 1. Understand, 2. Development & Research, 3. Design Activities and 4. Report (as shown in figure 1). The understand-phase lasted for two weeks where the goal was for the group to understand the stakeholder’s mission, the course goals, to define a target group and create interview questions as well as forms. The second phase was about defining a “problem statement”, conducting user research (interviews and forms), data collection, and analyzing the data by doing affinity diagrams and clustering work (Design Council, 2020). The third phase consisted of having workshops, paper sketching, making digital low-fi, mid-fi and hi-fi prototypes. This phase also focused on iterating the prototypes based on feedback from the stakeholders and user testing. The final phase was planned for delivery/hand-over, writing the report and the presentation in the course.

Figure 1: Gantt chart over the project 10 weeks of work

4.2 Understand

To grasp the project’s frame and scope we initially had two meetings with the two stakeholders, to gauge what they wanted and what we were able to do. The editors (Sofia Lundmark & Janne Kontio) and the CTO (Anna Nordström) as well as the publisher (Niclas Gårdfeldt) had their say in what they wished for the project to end up in. They were very helpful in clearing up what they wanted from us and what we should avoid. For example, Niclas was very clear that a shared revenue solution would not work, as Natur & Kultur (and the entire publisher market) wouldn’t benefit from that solution, since they spend a lot of money and time to make a book good enough for publishing. What we mean by shared revenue plan is like Spotify’s business model where users pay a small amount monthly to get access to all music and that money is shared between the company and all artists/publishers (Spotify AB, 2020). Spotify is a free music streaming service where users can play music anywhere, if you use it for free you’ll have to listen through ads but if you pay for premium you pay a fee every month with better music quality and without ads (2-Spotify AB, 2020). The amount of work the editors, authors and Natur & Kultur would do to make a book “publishable” would not be cheap enough for a shared revenue business plan. That idea was shot down very early in the project which was vital for us. In this phase we’ve had two meetings with Sofia & Janne, one meeting with all parties together, one meeting with the publisher and another meeting with the CTO.

4.3 Development and research

The user research initiated with two questionnaires (surveys) that we sent out to students and teachers respectively (see appendix 1–2). Surveys are useful in many ways, but especially when gathering sample data on a broader group, and are used as a quantitative method (Marsch 2018, p.121). The student-questionnaire asked the students about their stance on pirating course literature, reading habits, how they study, what way they feel is the best way to learn (like reading, watching videos etc.), why they download books for free and what form of course literature they prefer (see table 1). We specifically asked highschool/university students, or previous highschool/university students since this new feature for Digilär is tailored to that demographic.

Meanwhile, in the teacher-questionnaire we wanted to know if they pick the course literature themselves, if they have used pirated literature in their lectures, how they guide their students to get literature, what formats other than books they use to teach, what formats they feel like students learn the best by, the likelihood of them using extra material the comes with the literature etc. (see table 2). Both questionnaires were made in Google Forms (Google Inc. 2008) and all parties were notified of their rights to consent, decline and of the laws of GDPR (Marsch 2018, p.17).

Questions for student survey

Hur länge har du studerat på en högre utbildning? (Universitet/Högskola)

Brukar du köpa kurslitteratur?

Var får du tag på kurslitteratur?

Om det finns extramaterial till kurslitteraturen du har fått tag på, hur stor är sannolikheten att du tar del av det?

Har du någon gång tagit del av piratkopierade kursböcker? T.ex. laddat ner PDF utan att betala för originalet

Vad är det som motiverar dig till att ladda ner en piratversion?

Känner du att kursböcker är det bästa formatet för din inlärning i skolan?

Vilka andra inlärningsmedel kompletterar och använder du dig av i skolarbeten?

Tycker du att det finns för lite komplement till traditionella böcker för inlärning i skolan?

I vilka/vilket format skulle du vilja ha kursmaterial?

Vilken typ av format skulle du säga fungerar bäst för ditt lärande i skolan?

Table 1: Questions used in the student-survey

Hur väljer du som lärare ut kurslitteratur?

Har du som lärare någon gång använt piratkopierad litteratur till din undervisning?

Upplever du att det är enkelt att få tillgång till kurslitteraturen som lärare?

Hur dirigerar du studenter att få tillgång till kurslitteraturen?

Om det finns extramaterial till kurslitteraturen du använder, hur stor är sannolikheten att du tar del av det?

I vilka olika format finns kurslitteraturen oftast tillgänglig i?

Vilka kompletterande format använder du för att lära ut?

Vilka/vilket komplement till “boken” skulle du säga fungerar bäst för att få dina studenter att lära sig?

Upplever du att det är enkelt att få tillgång till kurslitteraturen som lärare?

I vilka olika format finns kurslitteraturen oftast tillgänglig i?

Vilka kompletterande format använder du för att lära ut?

Vilka/vilket komplement till “boken” skulle du säga fungerar bäst för att få dina studenter att lära sig?

Jag upplever tillgången till läromaterial i alternativa format än “bok” som: Tillräcklig, Otillräcklig, Vet ej

Känner du som lärare att dagens elever inte stimuleras eller lär sig lika bra av böcker?

Vilka komplement för inlärning skulle du vilja se mer av?

Table 2: Questions used in the teacher-survey

In the end of both questionnaires they were asked if they wanted to partake in interviews where we based the questions on the results from the surveys. In that process the group went through the result pages in Google forms and imported them into an online Google document.

The selections of students were made by sending out the form as links to student contacts on social media, about 20 people were directly messaged with the questionnaire link per group member. The students on social media were selected because the group felt that it was a high probability they would assist, and the majority of them had used pirated course literature (Marsch 2018, p.31). Since we know that some of the students directly contacted have used pirated course literature that could both have positive and negative effects on the user research. The positives are that we know who we are recruiting, that means we don’t have to do a thorough screening of them to determine if they are the people to ask (Marsch 2018, p.31–39). That also means that the answers from people who have used pirated course literature would be useful information. On the other hand, asking students we don’t know to use pirated course literature is no less important to survey as the ones we know do. The majority of them were previous classmates from the bachelor programme. There was definitely a personal factor between the students on social media and the group. The link was also shared in a Swedish Discord gaming channel that a group member is in with 499 Scandinavian members, asking students to answer the questionnaire. Discord is a free online service app/browser where people can create servers, where they can invite friends, have text and voice channels with 250 million players registered. The service is made for gamers to have their guilds/friend groups to play games together and build their servers (Discord Inc. 2015). The Discord server was chosen because of the one group member’s involvement with the guild. Since not all of the Discord members are students, giving a precise number of how many students were asked to partake in the questionnaire, as well as answered it, will be impossible to know and not many of the 499 members are active. The link was put in a “general” chat channel asking students to partake, which makes it impossible to know how many responded to it, and not messaged to channel members directly. It got two thumbs up emojis, perhaps that indicates that it didn’t get much attention but that’s no guarantee. In total, out of the 60 students on social media and the unknown number of students from the Discord server, 51 responded on the questionnaire. Regarding the Discord server, that’s a pretty low answer rate, but from the students from social media that’s a solid answer rate. And the majority of the students on social media messaged back when they were finished with the questionnaire.

Questions for student interview

Table 3: Questions used in the student-interviews

Then important answers were highlighted and the answers’ importance were discussed and put into context. By important answers we mean insightful, relevant for our mission and surprising that we could use for the interview to get to know more. An interview script with questions was created based on the survey. Interviews are a perfect method for understanding preferences and attitudes that often are hard to grasp from an online survey (Marsch 2018, p. 129). The interview questions posed deeper, potentially harder moral questions to if they have downloaded pirated course literature, why they did it, their opinion to reading books in general and their stance on it. We also asked them how they use course literature generally, i.e if they read the entire book, how they read it (skimming etc) but as well as what way they feel like they learn the best by (see table 2). If it’s reading at all, or watching videos, lectures etc. 6 students were interviewed and all teachers said that they didn’t have time to partake in an interview, all but one. Sadly, the one teacher had to decline later too.

The interviews were conducted over an online video meeting tool called Zoom with webcam (Zoom 2020). We’d label the interviews as semi-structured as the responses guided the discussion and our follow-up questions (Marsch 2018. p.129). The interviews were useful for understanding the students attitudes and preferences of reading, learning and pirated literature. We aimed to make the questions neutral, which felt extremely important when asking and discussing pirating (which is illegal) with the students (see table 2). The time-frame of the interviews were aimed to not be longer than 25 minutes, which the respondents agreed to before starting the sessions. The audio of the interview was recorded (with their given consent), and then transcribed. The transcriptions were then useful in the coming clustering/affinity diagramming (see figure 2).

Figure 2: Affinity diagramming with the group to gain insight

Figure 3: Affinity diagramming with the group to gain insight

The transcriptions were used as a source to highlight important sentences that pointed at something that we could use to motivate our design choices as well as provide the group with a clear goal the prototype should aim to fulfill. After reading through the descriptions together via Zoom, highlighting important quotes, and discussing them, they were divided into themes. To conduct a session of affinity diagramming/clustering work, the group met physically together to utilize whiteboards and post-its to visually cluster the sentences (shortened to a few words) into 9 different themes (see figure 2). The themes were however found out during the process of placing the post-its on the board. The themes that appeared were; learning, stance on pirated literature, economy-value, ambassadors, economy-price, loan-library, digital book, physical book and video. The post-its were then grouped into their respective theme. To concise the affinity diagramming, the themes were described in a document along with how-might-we-statements, what the interviews showed us and potential solutions (Marsch 2018, p.213). Affinity diagramming is a powerful tool to get the group to visualize and come to an unanimous understanding of the data that has been collected. The group later voted on to rank the themes in importance by using the post-it voting method (d.School 2010, p.30). The post-it voting method gives, in this instance, each member 5 dots to place on the themes they regard the most important for the project. ‘Learning’ was picked as the most important theme and the second was ‘stance on pirated literature’. In third came ‘economy-value’.

From the analyzing we set what to focus on when creating hi-fi prototypes. The service had to offer value to students apart from the content in the book as text but to offer alternative learning methods together with buying the book. The authors needed to be better ambassadors for their books in order to appeal more to students. The themes were easily connected since we found that pirating comes from the ease of downloading books via a simple google search, that the value of what the students needed from the book didn’t match the books price at times and that the work from the writers isn’t visible. The conclusion was made that we had to present the book in a way that made it more valuable. By that we mean by having the ability to pick chapters to buy individually, present the book as hard work, introduce the authors to users as hard working individuals to show the people who download books for free to see that what they are actually doing is illegal, theft.

To conclude the analyzation a POV-statement was written for the group to know the focus of the project in a short sentence (d.School 2010, p.21):

“Highschool/University students need to feel that buying course literature is beneficial, reliable and affordable to support their learning meanwhile the publishers can produce high quality course literature.”

4.4 Design Activities

Following the previous phase, the group began sketching on paper from a set of tasks. Focus was set on only to start sketching wireframes and layout, to leave out details and fancy design work (see figures 3–5). Sketching on paper is a good way to represent your ideas and thoughts regarding a design (Baskinger 2008, p. 28). The task during the paper sketching was to sketch four different possibilities buttons leading to video, text, sound files and study questions. An idea of having a citation tool was also to be sketched together with a page or layout for presenting the authors of the book. Two pages were sketched, one search page and one book overview-page. The sketches were presented and then discussed among the group members on what features and ideas that could be kept. Here the discussion focused on the structure of the layouts and the flow from search page to book overview.

Figure 4: Paper sketch prototype

Figure 5: Paper sketch prototype

Figure 6: Paper sketch prototype

To move from the low-fi paper sketches each group member was tasked with doing, what we call “mid-fi” prototypes digitally. The point of mid-fi’s for us was to go one step closer to doing the hi-fi prototype in Adobe XD, not commit the changes from the paper sketches but to test the ideas visually more effectively. Traditionally there is no “mid-fi” phase of sketching (M. Walker, L. Takayama and J.A. Landay 2002, p.661–665) but we decided to name it that because it’s in between a low-fi prototype and a hi-fi prototype. (Adobe Experience Design, Adobe XD in short, is a digital prototyping tool where artboards can be built up and connected via linking of texts to simulate buttons and animations (Adobe 2019). These digital sketches were the first attempts to include Digilär’s color scheme of purple, red/orange and white. The font that Digilär uses was also put into the prototypes, ‘Campton’. The sketches were highly experimental and offered each individual to create layouts freely and not to think about if these would be feasible for Digilär’s web team to implement. The search bar, overview of the book, video player, representation of the authors and an idea of selling access to individual chapters in the book were depicted in the mid-fi sketches (see figure 6–10).

Figure 7: One of the first digitized prototypes

Figure 8: One of the first digitized prototypes

Figure 9: One of the first digitized prototypes

Figure 10: One of the first digitized prototypes

Figure 11: One of the first digitized prototypes

With the completion of the mid-fi sketching, the group started on making hi-fi prototypes to try and realize the ideas and insights gained from experimenting with the previous prototypes. The hi-fi prototypes were created with the same format, every group member presented their own version to present and discuss with the rest of the group via Zoom. This time, the sketches had to utilize the colors and font-style of Digilär (see figure 12). During the hi-fi prototyping the group discussed and presented different layouts for how to present Sofia and Janne’s book.

Figure 12: Graphic profile of Digilär illustration

The suggestions varied but the consensus of the sessions was that the pages needed a sidebar for navigation, a split page where circa 60% of the page (excluding the sidebar) would contain the title and all other information about the book as well as the alternative learning material (video, study questions and audio). The other 40% would be dedicated to presenting that authors of the book as the user research suggested that the students didn’t care for the books because the authors weren’t representing their books well (see 4.3 Development and research). The third page to be set at the time was the search results page, which would show the book covers, title, author and price. So the books became hollow pieces of text which they had to read (see figure 6). It was also decided that the starting page would be a 100% wide search page since this part of digilär would be accessed from their site using a button, so this would then become a landing page for students and teachers to quickly start searching for course material. Even though initially, the rule was to use only the colors that Digilär used, the “winning” prototype looked very different from Digilär’s current graphical style. However, it looked more modern and pleasing that their current site and the dark blue really worked well with Digilär’s orange/red.

Figure 13: One of the first refined digital prototypes

Figure 14: One of the first refined digital prototypes

Figure 15: One of the first refined digital prototypes

The group decided that these three screens would serve as the layout standard for later. The design work session of putting in all the things we need from the define-phase started (Design Council, 2020). Here the complications of doing design work of several computers started to become clear, even though Adobe XD has cloud services where multiple people can work in the same project, one group member had only the free version handed out by the school which sadly didn’t have that function enabled. This created a disconnection when working with the prototype, since the two parties sometimes needed to wait for new versions or copy paste the new parts from different Adobe XD files.

Nonetheless, the design work was an iterative process. The process alternated with building the prototype utilizing daily goals of what to implement (daily scrum) and discussing the design choices with each other as well as the stakeholders occasionally. Firstly the ground work was made which had all screens made containing the overall layout and placeholders of what to put in. This design was then discussed internally and then tested on stakeholders; Janne Kontio and Sofia Lundmark & Anna Nordström separately. The feedback from those sessions were overall positive, they liked the colors and the layout of the prototype. Janne Kontio and Sofia Lundmark promised to provide videos, pictures of themselves to use for the author section and an audio recording. They said that they needed a way for readers to book lectures with them, that we should represent the other authors in the book as well, a way to purchase the physical book, an additional (deeper) page about the authors and thematic titles for the individual chapters. Anna Nordström expressed that we needed to add speech synthesis and to work out space for a payment subscription model.

After meetings were done, the changes were implemented and as for the payment model we created the shopping cart function which let the users continue shopping on the page and add several books to purchase.

After working with these changes the prototype was tested on a student to get a different perspective on the prototype. This phase was the usability testing phase. It was a moderated usability test. Here the group used usability testing to observe a user trying to navigate the prototype that was created (Marsch 2018, p. 75). Again, the feedback of the visuals were very positive saying that “it looked better than 99% of the pages they visited everyday”. However, they expressed concerns that there was no clarity if you were logged in or not, where the book ends up after you buy it, if they have a profile and why swish was an option at payment options if you are adding the book to your cart. This user made the group come to the realization that there was no clear way for users to log in to get access to the extra learning material as well as the point tester pointed out. After a long discussion it was decided that the prototype should have two flows, one where the user is a guest and one where the user has logged in/created a profile on Digilär. From nearing “completion of the prototype” and just as the group started on linking the buttons together, the task of creating different flows for guests and users pushed the completion date forward.

At this point, working with the prototype took three and a half weeks. The total weeks planned were four weeks for the prototype. Finalizing the prototype took the remaining time left of making the two flows, putting in pop-ups for log-in windows (see figure 16–18), a static part of the sidebar where you can see if you are logged in or not, and purchase windows, notifications for items being put in the shopping cart and finally the shopping cart itself with a “thank you for purchasing”-window (see figure 16–19).

Figure 16: Log-in window pop-up

Figure 17: Thank you for puschase screen

Figure 18: Buy pop-up and profile

Figure 19: Item in shopping cart notification

4.5 Report & Presentation

With a sufficiently clear prototype the last phase of the project began. This phase was mostly about reporting, finishing up work and sending of material. With a high-fidelity prototype and a lot of different links in the Adobe XD sheet the group decided to finish up the work by using a MVP (minimal viable product) video to demonstrate the project results. A MVPs purpose is to demonstrate a concept and give an idea on how the final solution will look like (Chou Cheng, L. 2016). The final solution in this case being if Digilär wants to continue working with this kind of concept. In addition to the MVP video the group put together a presentation suitable for demonstrating the project. The presentation showed how the project was carried out from the beginning to “end”.

During this time the group also worked with the report and documentation of the practical work, this to demonstrate how the project was carried out in text form, what motivated decisions, used methodology and so on.

A final meeting with the stakeholders was also booked, but in a time after this school project.

5. Method & Process Criticism

No methodology can gather all information. Design tends to cater to wicked problems and results in different methodologies. Nelson and Stolterman argued that “design is something unique, there is no true way to solve design problems, due to that design is always unique in its form” (2003, p.13). Our research may differ from how others would have done this type of project.

The user research methodology of interviews and forms may not be suitable to gain a real insight of the users. (Marsch 2018, p.65) claims that what people say and what people do isn’t a fact. People often tend to say what is expected of them in the situation. But when it comes down to it people act opposite to their statement. it’s, therefore, crucial to study the users in their own environment to create a valid perception of the user (Marsch 2018, p.160). An observation or cultural probe for instance would have contributed to a more pure understanding of the user than the chosen user research methodology. This research project relies mostly on what people say and not what people do, which could affect the end result.

From the data collection a methodology of affinity diagramming and content analysis was chosen. These methods aim at identifying themes in the data collection, highlighting patterns, words, and notions to make it easier to define problems and challenges within the design project. These methods are in addition to advantageous and also extremely time-consuming, and hard to master (Marsch 2018, p.209). When working with a content analysis it’s easy to miss important data (Marsch 2018, p.209). Due to the approach of following codes, both methods have easy to miss data that does not return or is mentioned several times. This means that a certain type of data that is mentioned only a few times or only occurs ones are easily forgotten. The result of affinity diagramming and content analysis could, therefore, end up in a skewed picture of what’s important. This as the method relies on both the individual’s ability to think about things, to argue that things are important, the outcome can become biased as much becomes subjective.

The design prototype activities as mentioned in this report, like sketching and prototyping can also be questioned. In this phase of the project, creative design activities to create mostly relied on individuals’ ability to draw, express, and format imagery. Due to different abilities and characteristics, the broad suggestion base of designs could also be biased. Some individuals might have greater experience of visual expression than others which could be more “attractive” to vote for the best option to work with. Different experiences within design programs such as Sketch, Adobe XD can also have affected the design process, greater experience and knowledge of the programs could have been beneficial for someone, causing bias and undemocratic prerequisites.

The testing and validation of the design/designs during the process could also be questioned. The methodology for validating and testing the design was through demonstration meetings with the stakeholder and users. In these meetings, the visual design solutions (Adobe XD files) were presented remotely over Zoom. The remote demonstration gained feedback and suggestions on details to consider. The lack of personal contact with the participants in the meetings was not ideal. The remote interaction with participants makes it hard to read and measure body language and other physical human signals, which indicates other behavioral patterns beneficial to consider in creating a design (Marsch 2018, p.160). One could also claim that our meetings didn’t cover the spectrum of testing out the design. Ideal in developing a design would have been by testing it out with a methodology of “user-testing” (Usability testing), simply giving users and participants tasks to solve with the design as a resource. A usability test would have given the service indications of things that work and do not, and clearly create conditions for improvement (Marsch 2018, p.75).

6. Results

At the end of the fourth week the prototype was set as finished. To see the final prototype click here (or paste the following link into your browser: https://xd.adobe.com/view/aeb4a364-6433-4626-6f5f-0809d3e52350-d885/?fbclid=IwAR1fnd-H95kxd-Egt1EgpvWYHqdMXqHKdjIYIEjKfsGWXgmF_ya2BrmpjPg). A MVP-video was also created for presentational purposes to showcase the functions and work of the prototype, below is a screenshot from the video. The video was made in two versions, one in Swedish and the other in English with subtitles explaining the functions of the prototype (see figure 20).

Figure 20: Screenshot of MVP-video

Figure 21: Screenshot of MVP-video

7. Discussion

One of the first pointers the group was given was that pirate copied course literature is a growing problem. The fact that students, and sometimes teachers, have a diffuse image of whether pirate copied course literature is theft, when we all can agree that pirate copied music or movies are theft, is very interesting (shown in 4.3 Research and development). The fact of the matter is that somebody is not getting paid for the work they have done. Exploring why this attitude exists was insightful. One of the key factors that surfaced from the research was that there is a certain group mentality when it comes to pirate copied course literature. The fact that other people and other students take part in pirating copied literature makes it easier for you to take part in it. One could draw the same conclusion when Pirate Bay and websites of that sort were up and running that there was an attitude that if someone else or many people are doing it, how illegal or bad can it be? An interesting research touching point is how teachers see this phenomenon. Students look up to teachers, and look up to them in a way. If it doesn’t start with the teachers taking a clear stance on the importance of buying course literature, it could be difficult for the students to take it seriously. This could end up in many different ways, but the main concern is that the quality of literature will decrease. If people aren’t getting paid, or know that there is a risk of not seeing the profits from putting down years on a book, there is a huge loss in incentive.

The early meetings with Digilär and Natur och Kultur made us realise the importance of paying, as we don’t have insights in how much it costs for a publishing company to release a book, and we don’t know how much time or money that is wasted on the authors part (see 4.3 Development and research). The same problem exists in journalism as everything becomes more digital. If people don’t understand or see the importance of paying for their newspaper, whether it be digital or paper, the quality of journalism will decrease and that would be catastrophic not just for the industry, but for democracy and freedom of information and press. News organizations have managed to navigate this better than the publishing industry with monthly payment methods for news. This of course is a little bit easier for news organizations as news is such an integral and worldwide industry that drives on the need to consume news to keep updated. Publishing companies have already looked at a monthly payment type method, which would be called a shared revenue platform. This is for example what Spotify uses (Spotify AB, 2020). By having services like Spotify and Apple Music, other pirate sites such as Pirate Bay, Cabos, Limewire etc have almost been completely eradicated. The problem is that literature isn’t consumed in the same way as music, and it isn’t as cost efficient. This suggestion for a shared revenue platform for publishing companies has therefore never really been a viable option.

Another factor to consider, is the way in which different generations consume literature, news, music and everything in between. A new phrasing has come to life, and that is 21st Century Knowledge, or 21st Century Skills as some refer to it. This is about the skillset and navigation methods to cope with the digital age and learn how to use critical thinking and problem solving (American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2010). Teenagers today grow up with the world in their hands, quite literally. Since the introduction of smartphones, you can now browse the internet and consume news, popular culture and sports where and whenever you want. This also has its cons as there isn’t really a way to validate if everything is correct or biased, thus the importance of critical thinking. There is also the factor of instant gratification. Why should someone read a four page article when they have access to a two minute video clip that summarises everything? According to Statista, people in the United States from age 15 to 34 read an average of 0.11 hours a day, whereas people from ages 65 to 74 read 0.61 hours a day and people 75 years and older read 0.8 hours a day (Statista, 2020). These are the issues that publishing companies are up against. The addition of video summaries in the prototype presented a solution to this obstacle (see 6. Results).

This made the groups concept and role in all this very interesting, and you could say that the group pulled it to the extreme. By implementing videos, study questions and audio summaries, the new platform that is created is adjusted for 21st Century Skills and 21st Century Knowledge. Even though this is all a part of making the authors bigger and better ambassadors for their books, it is also an example of which direction the book publishing industry could move towards.

8. Future work

The project that ended in a concept presented to the client can be further investigated. The analysis of the UX project is that there is an incredible number of students who use pirated literature for their learning. The pirate-copied literature meets the requirements that students often have on their course books. It is inexpensive, easy to access, and provides the student with enough content to pass their exams and course parts. Course books that are available for purchase today are considered to be overpriced as the cost of the material is not considered to correspond to what university-level courses require. Students are therefore increasingly choosing to download books as the gain from buying an entire book is not enough (see 4.3 Development and research).

It would, therefore, have been interesting to continue researching and working on how it is possible to motivate students to buy course literature and how to best meet students’ needs for learning in 2020 and onwards.

Our insight and suggestions we present above are that you need to find more modern ways to meet student needs when it comes to learning. The book and text-specific require a focus and effort from the student, an outdated format for learning. In order to better meet the student, we believe that you need to provide learning solutions that are of a more passive nature, that is, do not require as much of the student. Today, the student (see appendix 1) believes that he learns better through other formats than the book.

9. Conclusion

Through the research that has been done and the meetings with the stakeholders, we conclude that students want easy accessible and affordable course literature. Students also want to be provided with enough content to pass their courses and exams at an affordable price. The way it looks today, in some instances, is that only a chapter is required for the students to use, but they must purchase the whole book, which is seen as an issue. The platform that the group created presents a potential solution that could help students feel more comfortable in purchasing course literature, but also give the publishing companies more traffic and hopefully more revenue. How this translates, whether it be a shared revenue platform or a platform where students can purchase individual chapters and if the addition of short explainer videos will counter the short attention span discussed earlier will prove beneficial for students and Digilär remains to be seen. The group furthermore concludes that students don’t fully have insight in the ins and outs of how much it costs to create and publish course literature, and therefore miss incentive to purchase full books.

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