Co-design with your user - A participatory design workshop

In 2020, the educator team of Course Hero is curious about one question: 

How an educator use the content they find on our platform?

We know educators pay subscription to access a content in our library; however, what are the elements that help them to make sense of a content and be interested to make a purchase. We hope to uncover their mental model as a lecturer and find the opportunities to improve product to support their needs of preparing their lectures.

For that purpose, we invited educator to talk about how'd they find our content landing page useful, and add on a participatory design workshop to invite educators to actively help us design a product that they love to use.

Participatory design

Artifacts preparation

We prepared with a couple visual prompts to aid them talk about what's good and what seems less useful. 

(image)

A couple small square pieces of blank paper are provided along with the visual prompts. 

(image)

Lastly, a blank landing page with the lecture content that they'd be interested in is provided as well.

(image)

Workshop process

1. We provided a scenario to guide them to recall the last time when they are trying to find useful materials online to help preparing their lecture materials. With such context, the blank landing page with the piece of the material is shown to them in the form of a paper. 

2. We then guided the educators to pick the 3 visual prompts that'd be useful for them to make sense of the content.

3. We also guide the educator to identify the least useful visual prompts and call out the reason and opportunities for improvements.

4. With the aid of the visual prompts, educators speak out loud their wishes and preference on a content page. They then started to draw on the pieces of black paper to illustrate their preferred product experience and features. 

5. Lastly, with a page of the preferred features. We guided them to summarize how this final product experience they piece together could help them make sense of a content.

Result

With their description, the artifact, and an unstructured conversation. We found out a pattern that some features are much preferable among others. We then started to translate the visual artifacts into users' behavioral languages.