RoboTutor is an Android Application designed to allow students to "attend" educational lessons such as Math and English through an application designed by a team of Carnegie Mellon students and faculty. It is a finalist for the XPrize Global Learning Competition. Here is the official website. As an HCI researcher, I helped design a new login system so that kids who may not be able to read or write could login to their academic profile. I worked on this from December 2017 - June 2018.
Until the code goes public in 2019, certain information has been redacted to preserve confidentiality.
Initial Design
Our first assignment was to find a logical order (stateflow) for logging in, as the existing flow was lacking in the fact that was no way to distinguish profiles if a photo wasn't taken in good lighting. Another issue found through user testing is that the children liked taking photo's so much, that they were creating too many profiles. Above are the original and first revision of the stateflows, created on a whiteboard in the CMU CS building.
The stateflows were then recreated in LucidChart and revised over a dozen times, considering scenarios of different users (new vs most recent vs old). In the final stages it was simplified to show the main stages. The significant components of the stateflow were remembering the most recent user for a faster login, and allowing children to save an icon with their photo to further distinguish each profile.
UX Design
After the finalization of the stateflow, I create wireframes to help visualize what would be implemented in the code so there was no confusion between the developers and designers. I used the results from user testing and my own research from child psychology to create child-friendly screens that would recognized universally, such as using smiley and frowny faces, as well as large icons.
User Testing
After the version update in May 2018, videos were taken of children using the application in Mugeta (Tanzania). The overall login process took less than 20 seconds once the children were used to the application, and were visibly excited to start playing the educational games. After carefully observing these screen recordings, I wrote a development paper to identify improvements to be made in the next version update. Helping contribute to such an impactful project has really opened my eyes to all that design can contribute to social good.
