According to Dyslexia International, at least 1 in 10 people are affected by dyslexia. Students diagnosed with dyslexia have difficulty in reading, writing, spelling, being organized and managing their time effectively. Dyslexic students are currently facing difficulties using ASU Canvas. I have redesigned canvas for the ASU students who have dyslexia so that it could be easier for them to learn and access the ASU canvas to perform better in their academics.
My role: UX Designer responsible for user research
Duration: 3 months
Team: Individual
User interviews, Persona, How might we activity, Ideation, Wireframes, User testing, Iteration, Hight-fidelity designs
Interview, persona, storyboarding, information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, usability testing
Students often cannot read material on ASU canvas or complete their coursework due to their condition, not their intelligence levels. They need to perform well in their academics and at the same time keep up with other students in this competitive world which is really difficult. Therefore, I was asked to redesign ASU Canvas to help dyslexic students to enhance their performance and productivity in their course.
A new design of ASU Canvas would include a significant expansion of scope to increase the functionality in the canvas tool for dyslexic students by styling and helping students navigate through their courses. The resource would benefit both students and the university in terms of diversity, thereby increasing the revenue for ASU. In addition, the tool would enhance students’ academic performance.
- On the dashboard, users can see the current courses and schedule of the day, which will help them keep track of the assignments. Providing different colors courses can help users to identify the course easily. Students can personalize the canvas and be able to change read-aloud settings.
- Users can watch the video and get an idea about the module without reading textual information about it.
-This canvas design allows students to read their chapters in a dyslexia-friendly way through their chosen fonts, colors, and spacings. It is supplemented by a read-aloud mode (audio/video) that reads the text for them.
- Dyslexic students get lost while jumping from one line to another, ruler feature is provided to prevent this issue.
- To remove distraction, focus mode functionality has been added. Users can set optional timers of how long they want to keep their attention solely on the reading materials.
- Only current week is highlighted in the calendar to reduce the cognitive load. A weekly schedule will be created based on the calendar events. Users can add and modify the schedule.
- Dyslexic students have difficulties in writing correct spelling and grammar. To deal with this grammar and spelling checker, and speech to text functionality has been added.
I chose to use the Double Diamond framework to help solve this problem because I wanted to validate my solution through usability testing and iterate on it quickly.
I conducted 10 interviews with dyslexic students to understand their daily difficulties, needs and frustrations, and how they are using current ASU Canvas. Through a synthesis, I was able to extract 3 main pain points of ASU Canvas.
Based on our interview findings, we created personas that helped us gain a clear perspective of our target users and their goals and interests. I created a user persona that I aimed to use throughout the design process.
After understanding the pain points faced by the users and crafting a design goal, I used the how might we activity to brainstorm some possible solutions which could solve the user’s pain points and frustrations.
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