Education in the Digital Cultura social media
Project developed in Lantec (New Technologies Lab) - UFSC. The goal of the website is to be an open space to share informations about the use of digital technologies in the public schools curriculum.
Scope
Digital media about Education in the Digital Culture. A place for teachers, students and anyone involved with education to consume and share video, audio, text and image content related to the digital culture. This project was part of an online specialisation course offered by the Federal University of Santa Catarina in partnership with the Brazilian government Ministry of Education. The goal was to create a platform for everyone involved (over 900 students, teachers and tutors) to co-create content related to the course. I was an employee in the university lab that was hired for this job.
Since most of the target users had limited knowledge on using computers and navigating on the web, the team involved chose to create a responsive website in the wordpress platform. This allowed us to focus on the front-end of the application while the admin and database was pretty much covered by the platform. After doing some user research and benchmarking, we decided to use a flat design approach and long vertical pages with scrollable content.
Design Process
I used the traditional UX Design waterfall process, with the application of different tools such as qualitative research, personas, card sorting, UX mapping, sitemap, wireframes, low and high fidelity prototypes, among others. During the development we also applied usability tests to improve the website performance, iterating afterwards for continuous improvements on the product, following a Lean systems approach.
The team responsible for the development had 4 designers (myself included), a full-stack developer and 5 teachers, including the project leader. The technical staff designed and developed the website while the teachers provided the initial content. As the leader of the design team, my role was making sure everyone was aligned and on time. I also centered the main design decisions, approving them with the project leader before they were implemented. I also worked on the front-end development to help the other developer to implement everything.
Problem
The goal of this project was to create a place for teachers, students and anyone involved with education to consume and share video, audio, text and image content related to the digital culture. For this, we needed an application that users could signup, publish their own content and interact with the content of others. The website was to be used by people who only wanted to read the news and would mostly come from the other social medias (new users) and people who published content and were familiar with the layout.
Solution
We chose to divide the website in a few different parts: the homepage would inform users about the project and give a list of news for them to consume; about page informed users on the project idea, team and the specialization course; productions page listed everything that the main team was publishing together with other users published content; contact page and FAQ were default pages allowing users to send a direct message and learn how to operate the website. Users could also signup/login, giving them access to a dashboard, publish content and see/edit their personal data.
Most of the choices were made on top of pre-existing requirements, using the fast access to teachers doing the specialisation course to validate them. This allowed for quick stages during the design process, shortening the full design and implementation of the website to 4 months, followed by several improvements as users started using the available features.
Vídeo produzido para mostrar o conceito por trás do desenvolvimento da mídia social.
