Observations

I observed COS 333 and ECO 332 about five minutes before class started. In both
classes, my professors showed up early (earlier than I show up, presumably to
set up projectors, etc). In COS 333, Prof. Kernighan always arrives early and p
lays music. In both classes, ith less than a third of the class arrived, almost
no one talks to each other; rather, most people are on facebook/reddit/various
social media, checking email, doing homework, or texting. As more people arrived, some
students began to strike up conversation. It seems to be a fairly even
split between students doing work and entertaining themselves; however, there
were surprisingly few people talking with each other, especially among the earlier
students. These are large classes, and students tend to just interact with
those they already know.

• Student 1 arrived early to ECO 332, generally arrives early to all classes. She finds someone she knows to talk with.
• Student 2 arrived right before class started, checked email, and continued to check email through class. She usually checks email and/or facebook if she arrives early.
• Student 3 arrived a bit late to class, due to having to walk across campus from a previous class.

Ideas

1. A shared music playlist that anyone in the class can add to.
2. Class-wide chatroom
3. Simple quiz questions to refresh students’ memories before class starts.
4. Course-relevant news (which both students and teachers can add to) with comments and ‘like’ capability
5. Q&A (about anything) with professor
6. Random seat assignments, get to know your new neighbors.
7. Site for collaborative doodling
8. Stalker app — provides facial recognition (to names) for students and teachers.
9. Location and time-specific weather (is it raining outsides? snowing?) with finer granularity than city, morning/afternoon/evening.
10. Course-related question/answer (anyone can ask, anyone can answer)
11. Selection of interesting current research in the subject area.
12. Group poll for planning meals/study breaks/etc (similar to generalized doodle pool)

Prototypes

I chose to prototype 1 and 4: 1 since I’ve been in a couple classes where the professor sets up early and plays music until class is to begin, and it’s had a good response; 4 since the content is course-relevant and interesting.

1: shared playlist

4: aggregation of course-relevant news, papers

User Testing

Testing with idea 1:

Insight

Overall, the interface was fairly intuitive — once they knew what the goal of the application was. It’s not entirely clear from the mock up that the application is for playing songs (as opposed to buying them, for example), or that it is a shared playlist. The immediate reaction seems to be to try to interact with the currently playing song or the songs in the playlist (as those take up the majority of the space of the app), which I hadn’t planned for. Once they got to the ‘add’ button, though, searching for a new song and adding it to the playlist seemed to be straightforward. There were concerns raised that given at most a 10 minute wait, such an application wouldn’t scale for classes with a large number of students, since the playlist could dwarf the wait time. I then suggested voting on the songs to order the playlist (which I hadn’t thought of previously), which was received favorably as a potential solution. Users liked the idea, were generally able to navigate through though the purpose of the application should be more clear, and provided some valuable insights to improve the application.