Holmes 2.0

This is a common complaint I hear from both faculty and students, and unfortunately nearly all of ASU's online class are delivered on this learning management system (LMS). Luckily the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (HIDA) has recognized this problem, and supports our team's proprietary LMS (Holmes) over using Blackboard. Holmes 1.0 uses a PHP framework to deliver highly customizable courses for ASU's online art and design courses. In order to continue to provide the best user experience possible we reimagined the LMS. 

Team: Toby Kidd (project lead), Walter McConnell (lead developer), Josh Sipahigil (application developer), Ben Trussell (server admin), Stephanie McNicol (interaction designer), Jessica Brown (UX research consultant)

Innovating for the next generation LMS

For this project I worked together with a team to envision what the next generation LMS would look like. At the start we had three main target audiences in mind: students pursuing creative degrees in HIDA, students taking our courses to fill a humanities credit, and faculty who work for HIDA. We also knew that this system would have to have two main interfaces, a student-facing side where the course content would live and a faculty-facing side where instructors would grade or edit content. Based on pervious faculty and student feedback we knew there were three main problems we wanted to solve:

1. Minimize the cognitive overload for students and instructors when trying to preform tasks.
2. Immerse students in the affected domain relative to the subject matter of the course.
3. Figure out design patterns and features that would be intuitive to our target audience. 

Follow the data

Since this LMS would be unique to ASU we asked permission from some of our instructors to send out end-of-semester surveys to see what other LM systems ours students were using, and their general impressions of the courses. For this project, we worked with a PhD UX research student to help us plan and formulate the questions.

It turns out plenty of students at ASU feel neutral about their experiences with online classes (about 54%) and, overall, more students had a positive experience as opposed to a negative experience. The most used LMS at ASU is Blackboard followed by Canvas. We also used this survey to find users who were willing to meet with us for a structured interview. In our in structured interviews used additional research methods such as card sorting and participatory design to get an idea of how we should structure the information architecture of the new system.

In the flow

I worked with the developers to create a site map for the system. One for the student view and one for the instructor view. I then got to work mapping out user flows and doing a competitive analysis of Blackboard and Canvas. By working so closely the developers, they were able to help me understand the backend flow of information and I was able to make more efficient suggestions that would improve the user experience, as well as, minimizing the need for more complex back-end solutions. Once we had the most complex features worked out I was able to start sketching and putting together wireframes.

Designing the Interface

One I had a clear picture of the system I got to work on designing the user interface. There were many iterations and I found that I would have to build an interface that was flexible enough to:

1. Flexible interface that allows for enough graphic customization to engage students in the affected domain.
2. Neutral and adaptable to so as to fit courses in music, art-making, dance, and design. 

Since I would not be involved in the design of every new course creation the interface needed to be simply that offered areas within the classroom and lecture content pages to give instructors and our media specialists the opportunity to creatively express themselves and in turn engage the students. Below are a couple early iterations that did not work out.