Canvas Cando
Introduction: Millions of students around the world have utilized Canvas, an online learning management system, to help perform and manage academic tasks. Although there are many powerful features within the system, there are problems that keep it from being a seamless experience.
At CMU
Team : JinJin, Megan, Vishal
Tools Used : Figma, Miro, Keynote
My Role : User Research, UX Design,
Visual Design
This project aims to improve improving the student experience of using Canvas.
A key problem with Canvas today is that students have to navigate through an un-intuitive interface in order to reach the information most relevant to them.
There are often many steps to find and use functions, and the location of information can vary widely between courses and even between the desktop and app versions of Canvas. This causes students to become confused and frustrated while using the system, which contributes to Canvas having a bad reputation on campuses.
Why the need for improvement?
Let's first understand the market
Primary Research
Canvas’s main competitors are Blackboard and Moodle. We interviewed students who had experienced using these platforms and collected findings from online reviews to determine their main pros and cons around their information architecture (Hennigan).
What's the competition like?
Analysis:
Although the competitors try to provide an intuitive and seamless user experience, neither have developed a thorough solution that fully satisfies student users.
The platform that improves their information architecture to best accommodate students' learning needs will have the greatest chance of dominating the LMS market.
User Research key takeaways
Takeaway #1
Students seek personalization in their learning environment that can cater to their academic and organizational needs.
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7/10 of our Interviewees felt limited by the current structure of information and features.
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PESTLE analysis revealed social trends indicating a growing need for personalized and high-quality online learning tools.
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Half of the interviewees indicated that certain information and functions within Canvas are irrelevant towards accomplishing their goals.
Gap evidence through Research :
Students were asked to locate the discussion window under an assignment during the interview. Almost all interviews couldn't find it easily, and we saw back tracking and long pauses of confusion.
Opportunity area #1
How might we create efficient ways for users to reach desired functions in online learning management systems?
Takeaway #2
Students seek consistency to streamline their learning experience.
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Users shared that they find it difficult to locate similar information in each course as professors structure their information differently from one another.
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In interviews, 8 out of 10 students stated that there is no standardization in the display of information across the desktop and app version of Canvas.
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The 6 out of 10 interviewees indicated that they know the task they want to complete but sometimes get lost in Canvas’s structure of information, which delays the process
Opportunity area #2
How might we keep the experience delivered consistent across different platforms and devices?
Takeaway #3
Students highly correlate convenience with a function’s level of helpfulness.
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Participants of our co-design sessions explained that they categorized certain Canvas features as “used a lot” and “helpful” because they were easier to access and use than other features.
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The initial exploration showed how users rely on the third party platforms to achieve goals because they face complications using Canvas.
Opportunity area #3
How might we reduce the dependency of
users on third party platforms and guide them towards information needed?
Building off of the key insights, our team developed multiple opportunities aimed at improving student’s experience with Canvas.
We identified the following opportunity to focus on for our future solution:
How might we improve the process of finding desired information in Canvas to be more convenient for students?
Defining our design goals
and their possible impact :
Conceptualization and Design
Building off of the key insights, our team developed multiple opportunities aimed at improving student’s experience with Canvas.
We identified the following opportunity to focus on for our future solution:
Process used to conceptualize, prototype, test and validate with users to gain initial insights.
Through early validation of concepts with users, we were able to identify what features the users resonated with the most and what met their needs too. This helped us prioritize our selected concepts to bring it down to top 3! Concept posters were created for these 3 ideas and they were validated further through user testing which involved rapid prototyping and speed dating.
01.
My Notes Feature
My Notes is a one stop location for students to keep their favorited course files, assignments, and quizzes for easy access in Canvas.
02.
OneMod Feature
This concept unifies the experience within Canvas through a consistent class module format across both the desktop and mobile app versions of canvas.
03.
My Notify Feature
This concept improves the current mobile devices notification display to include more relevant information to students in a concise format.
My Notes is a one stop location for students to keep their favorited course files, assignments, and quizzes for easy access in Canvas.
This concept unifies the experience within Canvas through a consistent class module format across both the desktop and mobile app versions of canvas.
This concept improves the current mobile devices notification display to include more relevant information to students in a concise format.
My Notes is a one stop location for students to keep their favorited course files, assignments, and quizzes for easy access in Canvas.
Rapid Prototyping
+ User Testing
User testing for validation was conducted for these 3 concepts. The participants highlighted the positives, negatives and any questions they had about the concepts which eventually helped us analyze and prioritize them better.
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Final Concepts
Building off of the key insights, our team developed multiple opportunities aimed at improving student’s experience with Canvas.
We identified the following opportunity to focus on for our future solution:
Feature #1 : My Notes
Personalized notes for your individual needs!
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Notes contains an area for keeping typed notes for their classes, and helpful templates that can organize their notes in various styles.
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Customizable folders that contain student’s favorited items.
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Section for personal class notes with pre-made templates for note organization.
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Easy to read and locate labels for information.
Feature #2 : OneMod
One stop location for all files compiled.
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Students can create folders with their compiled files that can be organized according to their preference.
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It displays the information in a concise manner that is visually easier and quicker to locate for the user.
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Color coded icons to show the user what’s complete & incomplete and progress through modules.
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Direct links to documents and a unified Structure across modules.
Were our users satisfied with the features?
YES!
If I had additional time, I would..