CUA of the Month – August, 2010

Designing for 1:1 Education

by Jim Garrett

Sandra Shi is our first CUA of the Month from China. She is a User Experience Designer for Emerging Market Platform Group of Intel. With a background in Industrial Design & UI Design, Sandra has lots of experience designing software user interfaces and user experience (UX) for consumer, business, and various users.

Sandra is now working on UX design of Software Suite for Intel-powered Classmate PCs. Classmate PCs are rugged, affordable, user-friendly netbooks for students. They provide a rich, interactive, fun learning experience for kids, and give teachers new tools to engage students and enhance the classroom environment. They are part of Intel® Learning Series, a complete education solution designed for 1:1 eLearning in classrooms around the world which includes hardware, software, services, and support.

As a UX designer of Software Suite for Classmate PCs, Sandra met lot of design challenges. "It's a big challenge to design a total solution for 1:1 education. It's critical to understand your users, their daily life and the environment. CUA training gave me a systematic way for researchers and designers to conduct user-centered analysis and design, which was extremely helpful and also very good timing," said Sandra.

Continue

Designing for 1:1 Education (Continued)

One of the biggest challenges was designing for kids. User research and usability studies helped the design team to understand the characteristics and behaviors of kids. Interactive and attractive user interfaces make kids more engaged in learning. Using intuitive visual elements, kid-friendly design language, and delivering easy-to-learn and easy-to-use software interfaces are critical for kids using the learning device. "Kids are less tolerant; they will easily get frustrated or even give up if they meet usability or technical issues," commented Sandra.

There are two form factors of Classmate PC: clamshell and convertible. The convertible version is able to convert instantly from a clamshell design to a convertible tablet PC with a swivel touch screen and rotatable camera. This allows young learners to change form factors, interact, collaborate, write, and draw naturally.

Writing, reading and drawing are important methods for students to learn, which are strongly emphasized by teachers. Touch screen provides the hardware for students to do these activities on the computer and also allows for the possibility of intuitive navigation through touch technology. When designing the software interfaces, Sandra needed to consider the small screen size, resolution, readability, and the UI layouts for both landscape mode and portrait mode. The general interaction guideline is to enable finger touch first, then stylus, and finally traditional input method, such as mouse & keyboard. All main features are up front and can be accessed through finger touch. Clickable controllers are touch friendly and immediate feedback are provided on the touch.

Back  Continue

Designing for 1:1 Education (Continued)

For example, a student can easily press a software button close to the side of the screen in webcam application, and a photo will be captured with a shutter sound like using a real camera. When you write on the screen in writing software, the inking looks like handwriting on the paper. You can read and navigate the book all by finger touch and use stylus to annotate on the books.

To deliver a total solution for the classroom and school, the team also needed to design software solutions for teachers to interact with students in classroom, and for school IT administrators to manage hundreds or thousands of classmate PCs in school. The team has done a lot of field research in schools in different countries and regions to get the knowledge of current technologies and infrastructure in schools. They also observed classes to learn about interaction between teachers and students in real classrooms, talked with school teachers, IT administrators, and principals to understand their needs and concerns. The software suite must be easy to be deployed and maintained by school IT administrators. Useful and easy tools are provided for the teacher to interact with students and enhance teaching and learning efficiency in the classroom.

Over two million Classmate PCs have been shipped out to date and are being used in classrooms across the world in more than a dozen countries. "It's really a rewarding experience when you see students loving Classmate PC and using it every day in school, and teachers having more passion with teaching using this tool," said Sandra.

Great job, Sandra, and why you are HFI's first Certified CUA of the Month from China.

Back