UX Research, Design, and Outreach During a Pandemic
How our user research project taught us about K-12 HCI outreach and evolved into countless, virtual design opportunities.
The Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) department at the University of Washington (UW) has been conducting K-12 STEM outreach for the past 6 years.
With a plethora of HCDE UW students having experienced this outreach program, we are interested in how facilitating outreach has affected them and their college careers.
If there are so many people who have led this outreach, where do you even begin?
Well, it looks kind of like this:
And a good amount of responses to sort through.
We asked demographic questions to understand when they participated and rating questions to gain high-level insight into students’ satisfaction with their outreach experience. The survey concluded by asking whether students would be willing to participate in an interview with our research team.
With our newly recruited participants, we set up interviews to dig deep into how HCDE outreach has shaped their academic and professional experiences.
We asked the outreach participants about their prior outreach involvement, their experiences while in the HCDE outreach program, and about how their participation has impacted them after the outreach ended.
After transcribing the interviews, we worked together to craft an affinity map of our data.
Following our affinity mapping, I drafted a provisional persona and user journey map to further empathize with our users.
With our data synthesized and analyzed, we addressed our research findings:
Reflection — Impact on self
College students found that they became more confident public speakers, thought more inclusively about STEM education, and found themselves more interested in education or HCDE degrees.
Perception — Impact on the students we work with
College students perceived that they had an impact on the students they interacted with. For example, the college facilitators felt that they helped students define new, exciting careers to explore.
Insipration — Future Impact
College students have continually recommended this outreach to their peers. Additionally, some have brought the interdisciplinary aspects of this outreach to other outreach programs they are involved with.
From our interviews, it was clear that the HCDE outreach program has had an impact on their academic career and beyond. So, we hope to expand the reach of this outreach program by making a widely dispersed and accessible toolkit.
We were ready to go forward with this goal and our fresh interview findings, but we had to hit pause when the COVID-19 pandemic had our team sequestered in our homes.
We decided to switch our focus to helping the families who had to start teaching their kids from home. We began thinking about crafting a workbook to continue the outreach even while student facilitators and participants are learning remotely.
We knew that the workbook would have to be inviting, visually engaging, and rewarding for students. I was tasked with the visual design of the workbook and was able to compile our activity into a fun, distributable activity book!
But after we put the workbook together, I thought that a short video could introduce the activity and also provide the initial excitement students need to engage with the material in the first place. So that’s what I did!
Further, one of my teammates also wrote a Medium article to attract engagement from parents or educators browsing activities to do with their children or students.
It wasn’t until after we had these activity materials done that we realized these could be the potential building blocks of the toolkit we wanted to create for the HCDE K-12 outreach program. This insight inspired us to seek out feedback from teachers who we had previously worked with to see how their students might interact with the material.
With working and teaching from home becoming more permanent than temporary, we also established a way for us to facilitate the outreach activity virtually. Uncovering appropriate software and Zoom norms were barriers we had to find ways around, but we were able to work out the kinks to craft a virtual version of the HCDE outreach activity!
The Rollercoaster of User Research
You are probably thinking, “Woah I thought I was going to read about a user research project.” Well, you did! Plus a lot of other things we were able to accomplish within our research scope. This research project taught me that I can conduct interviews, go through data analysis, draft a peer-reviewed paper, but end up somewhere totally different. We took our research project in a spontaneous direction that allowed me to explore all aspects of user-centered design.
My main takeaway is that user research can pivot into countless design opportunities, you just have to look for them.
