Author-e Question Interactions

The Project

Design new test interactions for the Author-e document editor that allow authors of educational content to offer students a more engaging learning experience through a wider range of features for online tests.

Context

Author-e is a software firm that specializes in developing and hosting web solutions for content management. Its main product is the Author-e Suite, a component content management system (CCMS) where users can edit, store and manage documents, using a variety of integrated features like a document management system (DMS), a database system and an enhanced version control system.

The Author-e suite is used by a number of customers for the purpose of distributing educational content. These customers include both educational institutions and publishers. For educational uses, learning material can be written, organized and stored through the Author-e suite, and published to web players. The web players can be distributed to students, who can access the material, take notes and complete test assignments. The tests can then be viewed by teachers.

Role: Research, Design, Implementation

Timeline: 20 weeks (September 2023 - January 2024)

Tools and technology: Figma, HTML/CSS, Javascript, JQuery, SCORM

The Process

Understanding the problem

Within Author-e, there are several types of content that can be added to documents, including several types of questions. These questions can be used to create educational tests, which can then be graded. However, the options for question types were quite limited, leading to the goal of the project: finding new ways that the question interactions can be expanded to better suit users' needs.

I started by researching different question types used in education to understand their strenghts and weaknesses, and analyzed several products used for making online tests.

I also interviewed some of the users of Author-e to understand their goals when teaching and their experience with writing tests through Author-e, as well as other products.

Goals

Provide insights related to ways of stimulating recognition and encouraging communication at the workplace.
Recognize and encourage individual and team progress.
Facilitate employee feedback within the company, both towards each other and towards leadership.

Narrowing down the scope

Based on the information from my research, I decided to focus on three types of questions: matching, ordering and hotspot. These question types would offer more interactive options for creating tests, and can present information in a simple, highly visual way, by supporting types of media such as images. Another benefit of these types was that they could be quickly graded by teachers and easily reviewed for feedback.

For each of the question interactions I made prioritization lists of the features that could be included, categorized by levels of priority: Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have at the moment.

Editor menus

I made several prototypes in Figma of the editor menus that would be used to create test questions. While doing this, I focused on finding ways to present all needed features in compact menus, like the ones currently used in Author-e. It was also important that these menus could be expanded with future additions for less essential features, that could be used to give teachers more freedom when writing questions.

Prototyping - Early wireframes

Low fidelity prototypes
Focus on creating a general layout
Multiple iterations from basic requirements to full features

Prototyping - Usability testing

Higher fidelity, interactive prototype
Focus on finding usability issues, optimizing question making process
Tested with users with previous and no experience with the other interactions

Prototyping - Usability changes

Adding match answer combinations by dragging answers was confusing for users - replaced with editable, set combinations
Changes made to allow different types of hotspot questions and make editing options more visible

Creating the interactions

As part of the project, I also made the question interactions as they would be seen in the actual tests. While making them, I made sure that they could be used on different browsers and devices, with support for different types of controls (click and drag or touch) and followed the WCAG 2.0 guidelines.