Jan 2023 - Apr 2023
Innovatemap
An analysis of academic office hours and how to increase engagement for both students and educators.

Project Duration:
4 months (January 2023 - April 2023)
Team Members:
8 UX Designers

Areas of Focus:
Prototyping, User Interviews, Co-Designing
Personal Contributions:
Facilitating conversations within the team, creating high fidelity prototypes

PROBLEM
Office hours need more attendance.
Many professors have office hours to help their students through their courses and provide other guidance for their college careers. However, most students do not take advantage of this.
This can cause professors to lose the sense of connection to how their students understand the course and cause them to go with unanswered questions.
SOLUTION
Provide a platform for undergraduate students to easily have access to office hours with their professors, schedule new office hour appointments, and interact with other students and professors.
Through our solution, we aimed to increase office hour attendance, help students connect with their fellow peers and professors, and make sure no question goes unanswered.
FINAL DESIGNS
For our final design, the team created a functional prototype of a web platform that students can utilize to schedule office hours, have a forum where students and professors can interact with one another, and where learn more about their professors and their classes.
UNDERSTANDING
How can we get students more engaged with office hours?
Office hours are a way for students to receive help from professors and teaching assistants, as well as a way to bond with their educators. These sessions involve the professors setting up time slots for students, and students attending these office hours, coming into their designated meeting locations and receiving help from educators.
  • Understand why office hours are underperforming and glossed over by students
  • Ideate possible solutions
PRIMARY RESEARCH
Through our interviews with both students and professors, we found that there were both physical and emotional reasons as to why students do not attend office hours.
“I wanted to go to office hours every week for my physics class. I wasn’t able to go to them, because of how busy I am with my other classes.”
”I’m scared that i’ll be wasting my professor’s time...”
“I couldn’t get my questions answered because there were so many students ahead of me in line.”
“My class’ office hours is across campus. I don’t have time to walk there and get to my next class on time.”
INSIGHTS
From our interviews, we found that the two main aspects for encouraging students to attend office hours were social and logistical.
  • Students are nervous to be seen in a negative light by both peers and professors
  • Locations can be too far for students, or scheduling conflicts may occur with other classes.
SECONDARY RESEARCH
From the articles that we found ranging from academic support, college teaching, education, student engagement and encouragement, we found the following insights:

Office hours can...
DESIGN OPPORTUNITIES
We identified several design opportunities through secondary and primary research, such as  creating engaging scheduling, forum, and profile features for our imagined platform, since the main concerns of the students were around finding the time, scheduling the appointments and having anonymity.
We also discovered that students were intimidated by office hours and needed more personalized approaches to feel comfortable seeking assistance. Our research findings inspired us to create a solution that prioritized accessibility while also encouraging a more supportive environment for all students.
SKETCHING
Most sketches created revolved around the idea for an application where students could schedule appointments for office hours that students could attend. Some sketches included concepts of scheduling assistants, calendar views, profiles and forums, which were later iterated and fleshed out into low-fidelity mockups.
SITE MAP / WORKFLOW
As our sketches and ideations gave us more ideas about how to tackle our problem scope, we decided to stick to our original idea of making a digital platform that can connect students with their professors in an efficient way. We create site maps to identify the relationships between each page and function we wanted to put on the platform, and then solidified these relationships and connections by creating a workflow.
Site Mapping
Workflow
LOW / MID-FIDELITY MOCKUPS
Using previously made sketches and our site map and workflow diagram, low and mid fidelity mockups were created.
Calendar
Forum
PRIMARY CHANGES
While we made edits to the Forum and Professor Profile, these are the main changes we made to our design.
  • Intuitive Navigation
    To make the site easier to navigate, we merged the Home Page, Scheduling, and Student Profile. We condensed all relevant information in one place and used a call-to-action button to make scheduling more apparent.
  • Consistent UI
    To make the site visually easier to understand, we created a more consistent UI using the Atlassian design system.

kevinkim1118@gmail.com

Thanks for stopping by!

This site was created passionately by Kevin Kim.
‍
Copyright © Kevin Dongil Kim
Icons courtesy of Flaticon.