Design Gallery
Client
Design Lab @ UCSD
Duration
06/2021 - 08/2021
Role
UX/UI Design Lead
I was the main UX/UI designer and user researcher in this project under Dr. Grace (Yu-Chun) Yen and Professor Steven Dow, and I led the needfinding, prototyping, user testing, and pilot testing processes. I also managed two fellow interns within the same team and worked with the web dev team to realize the vision of the gallery.
Problem Statement
Learning design is stressful to the untrained eye. Novices tend to lack mentorship and community outside of traditional classrooms, and many existing design galleries are simply repositories instead of offering scaffolding. As a result, novices lack the confidence to improve and often feel stunted in their progress while learning design independently.
Design Gallery attempts to simulate a collaborative classroom learning environment to make design education more accessible for beginners and to help reinforce classroom learning. We specifically examine how a gallery crafted in a vicarious learning style can excel over other, more traditional design “repositories.” This research project is still ongoing, however this case study offers a peek at what I worked on.
After creating the medium-fidelity prototype from an existing low-fidelity one, I led the six usability testing sessions and a lab-wide feedback session to refine it into the high-fidelity prototype. The gallery was modified to prime the user to explore different design principles through filter suggestions that prioritized learning designs by core principles. This also helped to clue the user in on using the gallery as a tool for education, rather than just for viewing designs.
Features
First and final iterations of past student work
Feedback from experts categorized and tagged by design principles and sub-topics
Expert ratings and critique to understand why students made the changes they did
Content filtering, sorting, and suggestions to find relevant examples easily
Favoriting and note-taking systems to allow for active self-reflection while browsing
Submission system to contribute your own work to the vicarious learning experience
Pilot study
To determine the efficacy of our gallery, I developed an assessment to quantify design knowledge and differentiate between design “experts” and “novices.” The assessment asks participants to rate, on a seven-point Likert scale, how well a given design performs on design principles. Designs in the assessment show a marked difference in the ratings between design experts and novices based on the p-value of the t-test, standard deviation, and range and were determined by 11 self-identified design novices through Mechanical Turk, 4 self-proclaimed design novices from UCSD, and 5 self-proclaimed design experts through contacts from the UCSD Design Lab.
While the research is still in-progress, we believe that the preliminary results of the pilot test sessions do help to support our research and the idea that there is a gap in how we approach design education and education in general and how we might be able to scaffold this gap.
While the research is still in-progress, we believe that the preliminary results of the pilot test sessions do help to support our research and the idea that there is a gap in how we approach design education and education in general and how we might be able to scaffold this gap.
