Student Issue Tracker

Best Project Award for CPSC 344 Human-Computer Interaction Course - Fall 2013
(Among 100+ students and awarded by Judges from Industry)

A web-based issue tracking system to improve communication between course staff to help struggling students in large courses.

My Role
User Researcher
UX Designer
Usability Tester
Project Manager

Team
6 people

Project Duration
3 months

Usability Testing
10-minute cognitive walkthrough with 7 tasks 
5-minute semi-structured interview

28 participants from multiple user groups with 7 tasks
7 experienced TAs and 3 professors 
6 inexperienced TAs 
8 users with intermediate computer skills
4 users with novice computer skills

We performed some analysis on the current system being utilized, and identified the Pros and Cons below:
Fallbacks:
1. No history recorded
2. Limited amount of space for comments
3. Instructors cannot communicate with TAs, only the other way around

Positive Features:
1. Positive transfer effects (similar to Excel)
2. Integrated with UBC Connect
3. Easy mass emailing of struggling students

The Challenge

Keeping track of individual student progress was not supported by any course management system (UBC Connect, Piazza, etc.).

UBC CPSC 110 course had 3 Professors, 50 Teaching Assistants, and around 1000 students. This is the Introductory course to Computer Science at UBC, and thus is especially important for the Teaching Staff to ensure students are on track and succeed in the course in order to continue their path to obtaining their Computer Science degree.

User Research

We conducted 3 Semi-Structured Interviews with the 3 CPSC 110 Professors to gather their current pain points, challenges, and features they liked about their current UBC Connect system.

To gather more feedback from Teaching Assistants (TAs), we sent out Questionnaire and received feedback from 11 TAs, current CPSC 110 Course TAs and other CPSC Course TAs.

Low-fidelity Mock-Ups

Based on questionnaire and interview results, we decided on some key requirements of our system and built our low fidelity prototype using Balsamiq.

We then performed Cognitive Walkthrough with 4 Teaching Assistants to ensure we understood what functionality they are looking for in this type of system, and to point out any problems with our preliminary interface.

High-Fidelity Prototype

After gathering the feedback from our Cognitive Walkthrough, we designed and implemented our High-Fidelity Prototype and a more detailed evaluation goal focusing on our system.

Usability Testing

Our evaluation goal was to assess if flagging students, commenting functionality, and issue history provide better support for identifying and tracking struggling students.

10 minute cognitive walkthrough with 7 tasks
5 minute semi-structured interview

28 participants from multiple user groups
7 experienced TAs and 3 professors
6 inexperienced TAs
8 users with intermediate computer skills
4 users with novice computer skills

It was valuable to us to conduct Usability Testing from users with novice computer skills, to ensure our design was intuitive and had flat learning curve.

Usability Testing Results

The Usability Testing results of this prototype were positive. We validated the ease of use of the system by measuring the percentage of users that could successfully complete each task.

We have sorted each task in the application by importance with a scale from 1 to 7, and they are in increasing in order of importance to our evaluation goals. The overall average of task completion was quite high. Although there could be some improvement with the first tasks that we asked of our users, the most important tasks such as reporting an issue and investigating issue history had completion rates of 85% and 78% from all our users. After multiple iterations of evaluation, it was rewarding to see that the users responded well to our interface.

Future Work

For future work, we would like to test another iteration of our prototype with larger amounts of student data, implement mass-emailing function - as requested by professors, and also investigate the feasibility of integrating our system to UBC Connect system.