How might we empower teachers to better provide each and every student with the testing conditions they need to succeed?

📱 Interact with the Prototype

The Process

🔍 Understanding the Problem

🎯 Exploring a Solution

🎨 Bringing the Idea to Life

👓 Looking Ahead

Note: this is a theoretical project.

Background

Many mainstream classrooms in Israel include students with disabilities, among them those who need oral testing accommodations. These students need test questions read aloud to them and/or need to be able to answer orally.

The Problem

Currently teachers need to sit one-on-one with these students, reading them the questions and writing down the answers for them. Due to lack of extra staff members or designated time in their schedules, many teachers attempt to do this while the rest of the class is taking their exam in the traditional way, or use their personal break time to do so.

These disorganized, substandard solutions, coupled with lack of oversight and ambiguous protocol about the specifics of the accommodations lead to teachers feeling stressed, insecure and under-appreciated, and students not always receiving the testing conditions they deserve.

The Solution

Enter test.ly, an app that harnesses text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology to enable students to take oral tests independently. Using the app, teachers can easily upload a traditional test and convert it to an oral test. Students can then listen to the automatically generated audio versions of the questions and record back their answers, all without the direct involvement of the teacher.

Understanding the Problem

I took a deep-dive into the world of oral testing accommodations by doing:

1. Secondary Research: To better understand the special needs population in Israeli schools, and how oral testing accommodations work.
2. Subject Matter Expert Interviews: To uncover how policies regarding oral accommodations are generally carried out in schools, and what the teacher’s role is supposed to be.
3. User Interviews: To discover how teachers are handling oral testing accommodations, why they are doing what they are doing and how they feel about it.

Research Findings

This means that Israeli teachers are charged with teaching a very large number of students and making sure to accommodate students with special needs.

Who needs oral testing accommodations?

There is a wide range of reasons students can be eligible for oral testing - from physical disabilities such as visual impairment, to learning disabilities such as dyslexia and dysgraphia, to mental health challenges such as test anxiety.

How do the accommodations work?

There are three types of oral testing accommodations in Israel:

1. Read Aloud: A teacher or other staff members reads the test questions out loud to the student.
2. Dictation: The student dictates their answers to a teacher or other staff member, who then writes down their answers.
3. Oral Testing: A combination of the read aloud and dictation accommodations.

Deciding on a Direction

Two main players are involved in testing accommodations- the student and the teacher.

I decided that in order to increase the quality of the research and ultimately the quality of my solution, I would focus my attention on the experiences teachers were having administering these tests.

Understanding the User: Talking to Teachers

To uncover how teachers handle oral testing accommodations in their classrooms, I interviewed five middle and high school teachers.

Insights from User Interviews

I learned that teachers lack two things they need in order to provide oral testing accommodations: feasibility and clarity.

Teachers have gotten creative in how they deal with the lack of these resources.

👥 Some teachers try to have the student sit in the same classroom as everyone else and take their test at the same time, while the teacher quietly provides the accommodation to them.

🪑 Others have the student sit outside classroom and take their test at the same time, while the teacher goes back and forth between supervising the class and providing the accommodation to the student.

🥪 Yet others having the student take their test at a different time, usually during a break or lunch hour.

However, teacher feel stressed by having to figure out how to provide the accommodation, unsatisfied with their own solutions and under-appreciated for their efforts.

This lack of clarity leaves teachers feeling unsure of themselves and alone in their struggles.

The students are being negatively impacted by these challenges as well. A sentiment echoed by many teachers was:

Exploring a Solution

How can we reimagine oral testing accommodations so that students receive what they need to succeed and teachers can focus their energy on what they do best - educating the next generation?

The original idea was simple: Why have the teacher read students test questions and listen to their answers, when technology can do all of that?

I imagined an app that would allow students to play audio files of the test questions, and record their answers back into the app.

What already exists?

My solution seemed pretty simple at first, so I assumed it already existed. I figured I’d find that product and just send the link to my teacher friends! However, after surveying a bunch of different text-to-speech (TTS) and speech-to-text (STT) apps, I found that the problems I had uncovered weren’t being solved by any of them.

How should this work?

The general idea for the app had taken shape, and now it was time to flesh out the details.

I thought about the user and business goals of the app, what features were necessary for the MVP, and how the teacher might move through the app to accomplish his or her goals.

One of the things I focused on when defining the flow of the app was taking into account all of the different reasons a teacher might need to edit a test, and what editing capabilities that meant the app needs to provide. For example, when text-to-speech technology was mentioned, some teachers were wary of its accuracy in Hebrew and therefor anticipated needing to make manual corrections.

User Flow

Bringing the Idea to Life

Phase 1: Getting Started

I started out by sketching wireframes on paper and putting them into a wireflow so that I could visualize the user’s movement through the app.

Testing the Paper Prototype

In order to test the early concepts, I created a paper prototype and tested it on four people.

The insights I gained from testing in paper allowed me to shift course early on and ensured that my energy was being spent creating an effective, usable design rooted in research:

Main Insights:

Phase 2: Getting Specific

Armed with insights from early usability testing, I iterated on my designs and created more detailed, mid-fi wireframes.

I got feedback from other designers, iterated on these wireframes and then moved on to the visual design.

Phase 3: Getting Visual

I wanted to give test.ly a visual language reflective of the user’s needs and conducive to achieving their goals. I created a simple, clean logo and chose a color palette, typography, icons and button styles for the app.

Armed with feedback from other designers on the mid-fi wireframes and a clear visual design direction, I designed over 30 high-fidelity screens and modals.

You can view all of the hi-fi designs in a wireflow here.

In order to maintain consistency while designing and ensure documentation for future design work on the app, I created a mini design system/ UI kit.

Phase 4: Getting Feedback and Getting Better

I tested the high-fi prototype using both moderated testing over Zoom (5 users) and unmoderated testing using Maze (21 users) - so I was able to test on a total of 26 users.

Usability Testing Insights

After prioritizing the changes that needed to be made based on impact and feasibility, I decided to focus most of my energy on redesigning the assign flow, which had seriously confused users.

Assign Flow: Before

In the original design, users were confused by the assign process. They didn’t understand who they were assigning the test too, and were confused by the individual settings changes that needed to be made during the assign process. Here are some of the things they were thinking while assigning the test:

Assign Flow: After

I created a separate section of the app called “My Students”, with profiles for each student. In each profile the teacher can change the test settings to reflect the student’s specific needs, and those settings will apply to every test the student takes. This frees the user from having the edit the test settings each time they assign a test, and for each individual student.

I then added a modal to the assign flow that allows the user to select which student(s) they want to assign the test to.

Feature Wrap-Up

📱 Interact with the Prototype

Looking Ahead

Next Steps

🧪 Test the revised design on users, and continue improving the design based on feedback

🎨 Design the student-facing side of the app

➕ Add functionalities not included in the MVP, like integration with LMS and a grading feature

What I Learned

In addition to the lessons mentioned above (in the gray boxes with the 🧠 brain symbol), this project taught me the importance of ensuring that the MVP is well-defined. When I was overwhelmed by the constant thought stream of new features to design and new scenarios to take into account, I was guided by the fact that my goal was to create a minimum viable product that could be used by my main user.