PROJECT

Study Bites: Help AP History Students Improve Writing Skills

BACKGROUND

Study Bites is a website (http://study-bites.com/) developed to help high school teachers and students tackle the abstract, overwhelming, and disorganized nature of World History using intuitive UI and web navigation.

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Our client would like us to further enhance the website by designing a feature that helps students with their writing process by developing their critical thinking skills to write stronger arguments on their AP exam.

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Our client has a preliminary concept of this feature. For this project, our client would like us to redefine or recreate the concept based on user insights and also acquire about how valuable the feature would be for students.

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Finally, Design Bites hopes to receive a style guide and high-fidelity designs that their team can implement. 

Process

Problem discovery 

Research (interviews and survey)

Competitive Analysis

Understand AP History Exam

Research Synthesis

Persona 

MVP

User flow

Design Goals

Sketching: Crazy Eight

Low-fidelity Wireframing

Remote usability testing with target users

Analyze test results

Increase fidelity of the wireframe 

Refine the design

Style guide

Final prototype 

Client's Product Definition

In order to make history a bit more fun and help students feel more confident in their ability to learn (Vision). Study Bites will solve AP World History high school students' problem of tackling the abstract, overwhelming, and seeming disorganized nature of World History(User Problem) by using intuitive UI and web navigation (Product Strategy). 

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Study Bites is constrained by specifically focusing on AP World History students, and as result, trying to understand what a student will be motivated to purchase (Constraints). We know if Study Bites works when we see students automatically seeking out and turning to Study Bites when studying and eager to purchase a site plan to help them with their course (Goal). 

Discover

Prior to our research, our client has surveyed over 100 students and teachers by asking these questions: their interest in World History, difficulty studying for the AP exam, and the current resources they use to study for the exam. The problem that the students most struggled with and confused about is studying for the essay portion of the exam. Teachers were also concerned about students' writing and critical thinking skills. Our team created a diagram summarizing our findings from our clients.​

Research Methods

To help Study Bites better understand their users, we utilized the continuous discovery method to conduct user research starting with interviews & surveys.

Listen to Users

After we conducted many surveys and several interviews, we've received many valuable feedbacks from participants that are currently taking AP World History and preparing for the exam. 

“I mainly try to understand how the essay flows. Contextualization. Try to understand how much or how little you should write. How to make your writing efficient to meet the points on the rubric. ”

“The resources are all standardized with no deep insight or instructions on how to answer my specific questions. I know there are sample questions the College Board releases, but it's not what i'm looking for and it  doesn’t explain it well.”

"Textbooks are overwhelming and dense (e.g. Text Heavy)"

“Free resources are very dated. Some parts are relevant but no one has recent materials.

"There is no peer review because students slack off. I think peer review is helpful so long as it is good feedback."

“I've searched for resources to prepare for LEQ. All of them say the same thing, they are redundant and often have no examples. ”

Persona

This persona was created with observations, interviews, and questions from multiple student participants. We created this persona showing a student's pain points and goals when studying for exams. This persona also summarized our many findings from our researches.