Patrick Lasta

K-DAD (Knowledge sharing in teaching)

K-DAD is an online E-Learning platform through which students in the 4th and 5th grades of primary school and 1st and 2nd grades of lower secondary school can benefit from multimedia contents, games and concept maps with which to learn something about one specific theme.

The platform is based on the services offered by Moodle and the contents are managed by the respective course teachers who have the ability to monitor the progress of the participants, insert timed tasks and add new contents.

THE CHALLENGE

The main screens of K-DAD had the same characteristics as a generic sketched page of the Moodle service, resulting in a platform more suitable for university students and professors, rather than for the group of students considered by the project.

THE PROBLEM: lack of attention towards who should use the platform on the student side.

PURPOSE: design a new interface that is more appropriate, pleasant and engaging for the target user (students between 8 and 12 years of age)

WORKING METHODS

Remote work conducted using the tools offered by the Google suite and thanks to the vector graphics processing and prototyping platform FIGMA.

Given the participation of a non-Italian designer, the English language was adopted as the main means of communication in emails, calls and presentations.

The total duration of the work carried out was 3 months.

THE DESIGN PROCESS

Attributable to the Design Thinking methodology, adapted to an AGILE context

Screen by screen, various usability issues were identified using the Cognitive Walkthrough technique in combination with Nielsen heuristics.

At the request of the client, changes related to UI factors were taken into consideration, such as the colors of the interface and the illustrations chosen in order to make everything more energetic, captivating and suitable for the age of the students.

Some features of the teacher-side platform have also been redesigned

Two design sessions were conducted:

The first to propose as many versions as possible of the different components of the interface, focusing in particular on proposing new micro interactions to improve the browsing experience.
The second to refine the aspects positively evaluated by the client and focus on the final graphic aspect.

Each phase was characterized by the presentation of the material produced to the client on a weekly basis.

MICROTEXT

together with Dr. Ersilia Vallefuoco, work was carried out to rewrite the texts in Italian based on the "English for Kids" package available in Moodle itself.

Having had no previous experience with rewriting texts, I relied on statistics on the words most learned by children in the last 4 years and on a consultation with a primary school teacher.

MICRO INTERACTIONS

Micro interactions, portions of functionality that do not require time or resources such as raising/lowering the volume or labels indicating the strength of the password, essentially concern all those details that make for a pleasant experience and a user friendly interface.

After producing a list of the microinteractions present in the screens, it was decided to propose variations for each of them and decide on the best solution after a brief discussion.

The mechanics used related to this area come from the book "Microinteractions by Dan Saffer, 2013"