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Brief

A higher education client (name undisclosed) wanted to experiment with blockchain technology in the education space and hired our team at IBM to develop a proof-of-concept mobile application. This case study explores how I supported the discovery, user research, design, and development of an iOS mobile application prototype.

My Contributions

I collaborated with stakeholders including higher education administrators, parents, and students, to gather, prioritize, and iterate on ideas. This project case study is organized based on my personal contributions:

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Here is a snapshot of my process and what I accomplished in 3.5 weeks:

Building Understanding

The client came to our team with a vision for leveraging blockchain technology to potentially build a digital platform or service that would allow educational institutions to easily verify student and learner achievements. I facilitated a design thinking workshop to better understand client intent, discover opportunities, and align on requirements. Below are some of the topics we discussed:

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Our Solution

Our team proposed developing a proof-of-concept mobile application that would allow students and learners to document and share their academic credentials with educational institutions. The concept was to provide a secure, parent/student-controlled, interactive platform with blockchain technology to digitally store, categorize, and track students’ credentials as they progress through grade school and beyond. We decided to call this concept mobile application the Digital Student Locker. My role was to take this idea and build a prototype of the Digital Student Locker experience.

User Research

I developed a user research plan to gather insight into what features users would want to see in their Digital Lockers. For my primary research, I conducted interviews with a random sample of key users: students (K-12, higher education), life-long learners (post-education, employees), and institutions (education, professional employers). For my secondary research, I assessed the current landscape of higher education administrative processing for academic records.

Below are some key takeaways from the user research I conducted with students (results from other user groups aren’t shown):

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User Journey Mapping

Based on the user research results, I created journey maps for what the educational administration, student, and parent experience would look like with the Digital Student Locker. Our team used the journey maps to run a prioritization workshop with the client to shortlist key features for the prototype.

Wireframing & Prototyping

Once we had an idea of what priority features to build, I developed the initial wireframes of the Digital Student Locker. The challenge was to design a user-friendly mobile interface while taking into account the complexities of the backend system. 

I partnered with information architects and developers from the IBM AI Strategy (formerly IBM Watson) team to help inform the technical aspects of the wireframe designs and prototype. While I can’t share the final prototype, below is a version of one of a high-fidelity wireframe I built using Sketch:

Hand-Off & Learnings

We held design critique sessions with our client and received incredible feedback on the proof-of-concept prototype. We eventually handed the project off to the IBM AI Strategy team, but I stayed on the project to provide guidance for other product designers who continued to iterate on my prototype. 

This was one of the most unique projects I experienced since the objective was to secure client buy-in for a conceptual product rather than a product slated for shipment.

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