Many professors have office hours to help their students through their courses and provide other guidance for their college careers. These office hours often need more attendance. This can cause professors to lose the sense of connection to how their students understand the course and cause them to go with unanswered questions.
Our approach to this problem is broken into three milestones:
1. Understanding how attendance at office hours can be increased
2. Gain knowledge of how to promote conversations between students and professors to help students accomplish their academic goals
3. Develop a hi-fidelity design and a deep user story
Process and Activities
Goals
Secondary Research Insights
Through secondary research, we found that the two main aspects for encouraging students to attend office hours were social and logistical:
1. Students are more likely to attend office hours where they feel welcomed, safe, and supported
2. Students desire for office hours to be easily accessible when it comes to scheduling and they want to know what to expect when they attend
The benefits that come from attending office hours are academic and relationship focused:
1. Office hours provide a connection between the professor and student allowing them to be mentored and build lifelong connections
2. Students are able to develop interpersonal and networking skills in an educational environment
3. A correlation is seen between individual support (office hours attendance) and student achievement
Example of affinity diagramming for secondary research
Primary Research Findings
Our team conducted interviews to understand what the current structure of office hours is in different institutions, pain points that students face, how office hours are organized by professors , number of hours, locations, the benefits of office hours, etc.
After conducting eight interviews, we affinity diagrammed our insights and listed below are some of our key takeaways:
1. Students face a variety of challenges that prevent them from attending professor or TA office hours, such as time constraints, distance, a lack of direction, etc. resulting in a lack of engagement with the resources at hand
2. Students are afraid they’ll ask "stupid" questions and they get easily intimidated by professors
3. Students said they discovered that most of their peers had the same doubts but nobody bought it up in class
Ideation
After evaluating design opportunities within our project space, we moved onto ideating possible solutions, in the form of sketches, prompts, workflows, and mapping.
Sketching:
The team began ideating on our design opportunities by producing sketches. During this process, most of the sketches created revolved around the idea for an application where students could schedule appointments for office hours that students could attend. To narrow down our focus of our sketching, we asked ourselves “how might we” statements in order to guide our sketches in the right direction.
Example of one of my initial sketches
Empathy Map:
We wanted to understand our problem space from the perspective of the students and professors. Using empathy mapping, we are able to understand the emotions and thoughts of our user group and come to a clearer understanding of how we should tackle office hours. The empathy map is divided into four sectors: “says,” “does,” “thinks,” and“feels.”
Empathy map created in Miro
Low-Mid Fidelity Mockups
Based on our takeaways from previous activities, we began designing low-mid fidelity mockups in Figma. Our main goal was to design a platform that engages students through a scheduling system, discussion forum, and personal profiles.
Our second iteration of the homepage screen allows for users to view professor profiles by clicking bubbles on top. Additionally, users can view details of upcoming office hours and meetings. Finally, there is a section that links to the university's courses page.
Mockup of homepage screen
Overview
Our team developed a clickable prototype and deep user story as our final deliverables. By presenting a user story and exploring our screens in greater depth, we aimed to facilitate audience engagement and enhance the understanding of our designs. Displayed below are some of our final design screens.
Homepage
This is the main page for the platform we designed, some of the features include:
1. Ability to view upcoming office hours meetings you have scheduled
2. See information for courses
3. Schedule an office hours meeting straight from the course card
Final Homepage Screen
Scheduling
Once a student clicks to schedule an office hours meeting from the homepage, they are taken to a scheduling screen. On the left, a calendar view shows the office hours time slots for the selected class as well as how it looks in relation to the student’s class times. Slots show how many other students will be attending the same session. When the student selects a time slot, a scheduling option appears on the right.
Default Scheduling Design
Scheduling with a Conflict
Profile
Professor Profile
The professor’s profile is for students who wish to learn more about the professor and get to know how they might professionally connect with them. Students who enjoy taking the professor’s classes can view what other classes they teach. Main features include:
1. Office hours and contact information
2. Classes that the professor teaches
3. Research and publications
4. Personal biography
Forum
The forum section offers various functionalities for students, including the ability to browse through previously asked questions, post anonymously, and reply to other users' questions. It provides a helpful alternative for those who are hesitant to attend office hours or deem it unnecessary to do so for just one question. Through the forum, students can receive helpful responses from both their peers and instructors, making it a valuable resource for them.
View Class Questions
Post a Question
Search specific questions
View Responses
