As part of my role as a UX Designer at Strut Learning for their eMojo and SELDA products, I ideated and designed new pages from scratch, led user research to discover user experience issues with our Alpha and Beta prototypes, and coordinated with the CEO, CTO, and development teams to prepare development of our final product. This work included storyboarding, user journeys, design systems, wireframing, prototyping, and user testing to iteratively develop the product in an Agile workflow.
Strut Learning creates adaptive e-Learning technology to support Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) development in schools. To this end, we utilized research on EQ and academic performance to develop our EQ/SEL technologies to integrate seamlessly across education environments.
Students with strong EQ, who are better able to understand and manage their emotions effectively, do better at school than their less skilled peers, as measured by grades and standardized test scores, and are correlated with better emotional, behavioral, academic, and career potential.
Knowing this, we looked into how E-Learning platforms may be able to accommodate for and teach EQ skills alongside their regular academic content, researching design and content considerations which may impact development.
Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation showed that students whose kindergarten teachers rated them high in EQ and social competence were four times more likely to obtain a college degree than students who rated low.
Study results also indicated that the greater the difference between students’ social competence scores in kindergarten, the more pronounced the difference in their outcomes by the age of 25.
Since social competence is a significant indicator of success across education, employment, mental health, and more, improving EQ and SEL skills is incredibly important from a young age, and should be developed alongside students’ academic studies.
Emojo is a learning platform that adapts to students' needs in real-time. Teachers can create full-length lessons including reading, videos, activities, and assessments. Meanwhile, their students will develop their EQ and SEL skills alongside their education through journaling, activities, and reflection assignments.
Working alongside Emojo, SELDA is an EQ assessment designed to give a comprehensive report on students' emotional intelligence, showing parents, teachers, and administrators how their children are developing and helping Emojo adapt to each student's needs.
Our platform has four main users: teachers, students, parents, and administrators. While teachers build lessons and students use them, parents and administrators can see their student’s progress and EQ development.
Along with creating high fidelity wireframes from our pen-and-paper low fidelity wireframes, we also wrote user stories, journey mapped, and created fully-interactive prototypes on Figma for every persona.
In creating our design system, we chose a color palette that would feel friendly and inviting by using a broad, vibrant spectrum of colors. Additionally, we gave every persona their own primary accent color to differentiate across experiences.
For our font, our top consideration was readability across devices. For this, we chose Montserrat: a pleasing and easygoing sans-serif font.
Teachers can create lessons from scratch for every class to meet their specific curriculum. EQ development activities are distributed across lessons automatically, helped develop students’ SEL alongside course material.
Students can watch videos, take quizzes, and complete activities for both curriculum and EQ development. At the beginning of every lesson, students are encouraged to be mindful of their emotions with journaling, surveying, and other activities.
Students’ lessons adapt to their needs automatically, and can be adjusted manually for every class or for individual students. Adjustments can help to increase feedback, lesson breaks, length of lessons, and provide redoes for quizzes.
Teachers, parents, and administrators can review how their students’ are progressing not just through the curriculum, but through EQ development as well.
Leading User Testing and UX Research for the alpha version of eMojo, we used our full-scale Figma prototype to perform observational testing and user interview on primary school teachers across Chicago, recording their ability to navigate the site and use its features. We wanted to make sure the app had a quick learning curve, was easy to use, and felt useful to teachers from all backgrounds.
Interviewing teachers from both public and private schools, we asked about their experience with online learning platforms and classroom management systems. We discovered that most have experience with online tools and acknowledged that, regardless of their skill in using them, they assist in students' learning.
In testing, we assigned the teachers a set of tasks to complete on the prototype, observing their performance and noting areas of struggle or confusion. Minimal assistance was given to test the usability of our designs and how quickly teachers could learn to use its features.
In the end, we found multiple sections where teachers felt overwhelmed with the number of buttons and features, making it difficult for them to quickly finish their tasks. For example, when reading grade reports, multiple teachers had difficulty understanding the class comparison feature because of the placement of the “Subject Selection” dropdown menu.
I believe that Strut Learning and eMojo can make a real difference in the E-Learning space. Most of the teachers I interviewed mentioned either difficulty using contemporary platforms or having to use multiple online resources simultaneously. If Strut can create an all-in-one, easy-to-use platform and effectively demonstrate how EQ and SEL is improved and what that does for students, then they will have the best product on the market.
In their closing statements, many of the participants liked the features we were introducing to EdTech; specifically, they liked the real-time adaptation to students' needs and the EQ development overview. This showed us that we were on the right track, and with further iteration we moved into the beta stage of development confident in our ability to provide both a usable and useful tool for teachers.
I'd love to help with your next project and I'm always available for a chat. If you have any questions or you'd like to get in touch, feel free to contact me.
