Designing CAIA
Assessing User Needs & Expectations
We started the design process of CAIA by taking a look at the typical demographic of school counselors in the United States. The vast majority of counselors tend to be young, white females and for that reason, our initial prototype looked like the picture you see to the left. We also decided to conduct a short survey with a sample of our target learners at College Track, a local non-profit organization, to understand what their most prominent concerns are when it comes to college finances. We used this data to guide us in developing the informational content of our first prototype.
The First Prototype
It was important to take into consideration how students would interact with CAIA when we started to design our first prototype. In order to provide a safe and effective learning environment, one important aspect of the interaction was that it be as natural and familiar as possible. For that reason, we decided that CAIA would use a natural language interface - meaning that the system would be able to understand and interpret spoken words from a user. This would mimick as closely as possible the counseling environment to which most students are accustomed.
Clearly, the development of the back end technology to support the the natural language processing required to implement our full vision was not in the scope of this prototype, or even the project, at this stage. Instead we were able to use Adobe Flash CS3 and software that was donated to us from SitePal to create a compelling prototype that would allow us to "Wizard of Oz" the interaction with students.
User Testing
Once we completed the design of our first prototype, we wanted to have students use it to get their input on CAIA and to see if we were on the right track toward developing an effective learning environment for college counseling. To this end, we conducted a user test and assessment at College Track with eight high school students from East Palo Alto, CA. For the details on this process, please see the Assessment section of this site. Input from students and professors, as well as the results of our assessment, were incorporated into the final design of our solution.
Finalizing the Design
There were several sources of input that were taken into consideration when iterating on the design of CAIA. The first (and most obvious) change was to her appearance, which you can see to the right. While the first prototype reflected the demographic of most college counselors, feedback from professors and from College Track staff suggested that it would be easier for students to feel comfortable with CAIA if she more closely represented their demographic. Another feature that was added was an area for captions where students could read what CAIA says while she is speaking to them. This addition was based on interview feedback from students in our user test.
Finally, we added a section on the interface for notes. In our assessment, we noticed that students were consistently getting certain types of questions wrong, such as important dates or websites. Since it is important for students to have this type of information, but it is less important that they have it memorized, this notes section is used to record that type of information when it comes up. It also allows students to make their own notes. They can then save the notes on their computer to look at later on if they need to.
Presenting the Design
Because the scope of our project was to design a prototype for this college counseling environment and not to complete development of the back end, finding an effective way to present our work was a challenge. The two key features of CAIA are interactivity and personalized information. We decided that the best way to demonstrate our vision would be to create a video prototype showing how a particular student would use CAIA, allowing us to show off the interactivity as well as the personalization. Developing a "learner profile" also helped to demonstrate personalization with the modified prototype that is accessible on our website.