Hi, I’m Vivian
Los Angeles based Product Designer,
Available for work
About Me
Resume
Hi, I’m Vivian
Los Angeles based Product Designer,
Available for work
About Me
Resume
SourcED: Student Hub App
OverviewI collaborated with two of my peers from my teaching credential program on this contest submission, as we all thought it seemed fitting to incorporate our learnings of culturally sustaining pedagogy into a side project. The objective of the contest was to create a healthy and inclusive digital space for individuals/communities to thrive. Our submission addresses the gaps that are found in current educational apps, and attempts to aid in students’ social and academic success.
Check out our submission here.
We began the design process by interviewing professors in our program, as their experiences as teachers could help shape our proposal. We asked them for suggestions on how current educational services could be improved for students. In addition to interviewing professors, we conducted a survey among high school and college students on the usability of their current educational services.
During our interviews, students were told to outline how studying and turning in assignments for a week would look like. This helped us gain insight to products within the field of e-learning and to empathize with the frustrations that students and teachers were voicing. From our surveys, we observed that students found it difficult to manage the different platforms needed to succeed in a classroom. In addition to this, they felt limited in communication, having to default to emailing their teachers questions they would rather ask their peers. There was no way for these students to even access the emails of their classmates unless it was during their Zoom meetings.
Many professors voiced that students would benefit from a community page in order to boost engagement of social events. As people were starting to go back to in-person learning, teachers have observed that students were not as social as they had experienced before the pandemic.
Students’ main complaints centered around not being able to connect with their peers on these apps, and wished for a chat function. Additionally, students also felt that there are too many applications to keep track of, as teachers utilized many services to supplement their classrooms.
The pandemic allowed for many innovative educational applications to shine but students feel overwhelmed with the amount of accounts to keep track of, as educators are continuing to implement those same technologies even after returning to the physical classroom. Teachers Our main goal was to incorporate the main features that other applications provide into one platform.
I believe that slimming down the task flow for students will ultimately aid in their educational success. Not only are we thinking of the student, but also their parents, who also feel the same information fatigue when helping their kids navigate their learning.
In addition to aggregating key features into one platform, students would also benefit from the ability to socialize on the platform. Teachers have observed that distanced learning has made students more timid and shy.
We created a FigJam to outline the different features and ideas we wanted to incorporate into our proposal. Considering all of the information that we collected from our interviews, we attempted to implement only the essential suggestions to avoid making our proposal too bloated with features.
Utilizing the insights we gained through surveys and meetings, we defined a sitemap. We made sure to incorporate both teacher and student wants, such as a community page and a messaging function.
After brainstorming, we started creating low fidelity wireframes to visualize the flow of information. We drew inspiration from current educational platforms (Canvas, Blackboard, iLearn, etc.), but also social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. We wanted to create something that was familiar with the student demographic to ensure that the design was intuitive.
Although our proposal wasn’t picked, it was still a great learning opportunity for my team and I. From working out disagreements to following a style guide to create a homogenous design, I believe that we all had an opportunity to strengthen our skills. Personally, this was a great project for me to hone my Figma skills and it made me realize the intricacies of working with a team, such as personal time management and delegating tasks. It was fulfilling to watch our idea come to fruition through collaboration, even if it is just a simple prototype.
Due to the submission deadline, we were not able to test the prototype and to iterate on it further. If given more time, we would probably conduct more research by testing the prototype with students and teachers and build upon new findings. I also would like to explore building a teacher or parent view version.
© 2025 Vivian Chen