Extended Reality in Higher Education
Product Design Case Study
TLDR;
Four grad school students created a proof of concept for their university’s Learning Support Services department.
Our team assumed our goal was to establish a certification process for faculty to gain foundational knowledge and skills in extended reality technologies. However, the final result was different than what we initially proposed.
Background
At the time of this project, George Mason University (GMU)’s Learning Support Services (LSS) unit was building an extended reality (XR) lab.
GMU’s XR Lab aspired to educate faculty on the instructional capabilities of XR technology and facilitate proper usage of the lab’s space and equipment.
To support this goal, our team aimed to develop a solution to up-skill faculty in cutting-edge learning technologies.
*Note: XR extends the spectrum of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality environments.
Discover
Our goal was to uncover current baseline understandings of XR and how GMU faculty perceive this technology.
We conducted 3 user interviews with GMU faculty to gauge:
familiarity with XR technologies;
practical applications of XR tools; and
motives for using technology in course development.
Additionally, we conducted 1 stakeholder interview with an external SME to more holistically understand the XR landscape within higher education in the U.S. It was also helpful to explore best practices to create an effective and sustainable training and certification path for faculty seeking to leverage XR technologies.
Initial Insights
The interviews surfaced some strengths of XR, challenges preventing wider adoption, and potential design opportunities.
Strengths:
Students are often innovative in their utilization of XR tech and enjoy using it
Low entry point, users can start with simple XR tools that are widely available
Challenges:
Wide range of faculty’s familiarity with XR tech
Many constraints to consider (e.g., cost, time, staffing)
Opportunities:
Demonstrate value-add to faculty
Create fun and simple learning experiences
Leverage remote elements to supplement in-person training
Define
We synthesized our research and created various data modeling artifacts to help us make sense of all the information we collected.
These artifacts included:
Work Activity Affinity Diagram - mapped out initial groups such as relationships, challenges, desires, outcomes, personas, aspects of training, and potential impacts.
User Work Roles - illustrated how different users would interact with the Lab.
Flow Model - identified pain points and visualized relationships between users and stakeholders.
User Stories
We identified 4 main stakeholders and created 8 user stories that would inform our design intervention.
Stakeholders, in order of priority:
Faculty
Instructional Technologists
Students (current and prospective
Stakeholders (internal and external)
Sample User Stories:
As a professor, I want training for XR technology to fit into my already busy schedule so that I don’t have to sacrifice the quality of my teaching or research to learn a new technology.
As an internal stakeholder, I want the university to be a leader in teaching and learning so that we can attract more students, funding, and recognition.
Overall Takeaways:
Faculty and Instructional Technologists have varying expectations of how much individualized training and support should be provided.
They agree that initial training shouldn’t take much time away from daily tasks.
Student and stakeholder considerations showcase potential motivating factors for faculty to learn and demonstrate their new skills in XR.
Design
Although a training intervention was still relevant, we discovered that our core challenge was to educate GMU faculty on the uses of XR and the resources the Lab provides.
Ultimately, we shifted our MVP from a training and certification program to an information repository. Our new goal was to establish a web presence to educate faculty on the existence of the XR Lab and the technology and resources it provides within an educational context. The website would also provide users with a portal to enroll in training and/or schedule consultations with an Instructional Technologist.
Our design process started with sketching initial concepts before moving into more refined wireframes.
Design Studio - facilitated an interactive brainstorming session to sketch and align on some initial concepts.
Moodboard - balanced GMU visual branding while adding modern design elements to keep up with the high-tech, innovative feel of a lab.
Wireframes - translated initial sketches into lo-fi wireframes and connected our user stories to each element to ensure we met our defined requirements.
After an initial design critique, we iterated and then transitioned to high-fidelity wireframes for usability testing.
Usability Testing
Our goal was to test the proposed information architecture and further explore mental models around XR technology in education.
We created 3 tasks and conducted 4 usability tests with:
2 GMU faculty members;
1 external educator; and
1 GMU SME.
We documented the speed at which users could access information and user satisfaction scores (based on a scale of 0-5 with 5 being the maximum satisfactory score). This quantitative data supplemented the qualitative data received anecdotally throughout the testing sessions.
Usability Findings
All our metrics fell below the target indicated for satisfactory, so we analyzed the transcript notes for details that explained the low scores.
We identified 6 problem areas (listed in order of priority):
Site navigation did not meet user expectations.
Site organization did not align with user mental models.
Participants did not understand the differences and relationships between training and consultations.
Signing up for training and consultations was not intuitive.
Participants were uncertain about how the equipment differs.
Participants expected an ‘About’ page to be included.
We used a matrix to plot our problems based on impact and effort, and concluded that Problems 1-4 yield the highest impact. Although Problems 5-6 are low effort, they were also lower impact, so we deprioritized them for the MVP.
Deliver
Our final output was a high-fidelity prototype that served as a proof of concept for GMU’s XR Lab.
The goal of our MVP was to:
showcase and educate users on the benefits of XR technology;
help faculty and students tap into a larger XR community within the university; and
facilitate in-person training and consultations.
Video preview of the XR Lab website prototype.
Potential Next Steps
We crafted a list of short-term and long-term improvements that could be made, and recommended further iteration and testing before launch.
Short Term
Improve site navigation and organization to align with user expectations and mental models.
Define training and consultations, and more clearly display the differences between the 2 offerings.
Separate training and consultations onto different sections/pages to further delineate the respective offering and sign-up processes.
Long Term
Add more robust information regarding the Lab, the equipment it offers, and the administrative details of the space.
Reflection
Each team member brought a unique expertise, giving us a solid balance of skills and responsibilities.
As the resident UX Designer, I drove our overall design process, facilitated project management and working sessions, and owned the creation of our service and product design artifacts.
Looking back, one thing I’d change would be to use Figjam instead of Mural as our virtual whiteboard tool. We had already decided on Figma to create our prototype, so it would’ve been easier to use Figjam for our initial research and refinement instead of maintaining 2 separate tools.