Research Plan

Many clients had requested the addition of a new feature in the software that would allow administrators on Brightspace to save a lot of time when adding or removing enrollments in individual courses throughout many different semesters. In order to ensure that this feature would be released in a polished state that met the needs of our clients I created a research plan that outlined the following:

• The primary objective of the new feature as well as the details that clients had suggested
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• Outlining the primary research goals that I would later test with users. These goals aimed to ensure that the feature was truly fulfilling the needs that the clients had asked for, and to test for potential errors that may occur in order to ensure that the new feature could launch with minimal issues.
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• A list of research methods that would be used as well as an explanation as to why I believed these methods would yield the best results.
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• Highlighting the procedure and potential outcomes of the research

• A session guide that would be used for the 1 on 1 research sessions that would later be done with clients during testing.

Conducting Cognitive Walkthroughs with Brightspace users

After the session guide was complete, I worked with the designer on the project to ensure that we had a usable prototype. This prototype had workflows that mimicked the current software as well as the new feature that was being worked on. Our goal was to schedule 10 cognitive walkthroughs in which we would have participants go through a workflow of the new feature and explain any issues, frustrations, or really, anything that crossed their minds while going through the workflow. We would use this data to reiterate the design choices of the prototypes in order to ensure that this new feature would be user friends and very easy to implement once it was launched.

After the prototype was complete, I scheduled 10 cognitive walkthroughs with administrators or instructors who have experience with Brightspace. All of the data from these 10 sessions was transferred over into Miro where I conducted a thematic analysis.

Creating a Research Report and sharing the findings with the Development team

After finishing the thematic analysis, I began wrote out a detailed findings report that was open to anyone who would be working on the project; however I also created a presentation to share with the development team to quickly highlight the most prevalent themes that arose during the tests.

This presentation was great, as many questions and discussions arose which allowed me to better understand how the developers could address some of the potential issues that the tests had discovered and the limitations to what the software was capable of doing. The developers and myself brainstorms ideas that could be implemented going forward during the development of the new feature.

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