Introduction

CoStudy is a survey and assessment tool with a higher education focus, providing professors with a means of easily creating, distributing, and evaluating peer-focused reflection assessments to students within their course. Professors receive an open slate to create, distribute, and score either their own evaluations or utilize an existing template designed for a specific use case within the timeline of a course. Professors are able to configure and customize each assessment, with the final output often focused within the peer evaluation lens. Students receive an experience that allows view assigned evaluations, assess their peers individually, providing feedback uniquely per student, and ultimately receive and reflect upon evaluation responses provided from their peers. Focusing their interaction while logged into a course was of primary concern, as providing a platform that remained minimally intrusive while still providing accurate, thoughtful insights during the evaluation process was of upmost importance.

UX Challenges

When first trying to better understand the peer evaluation process, we began with a number of both professor and student interviews, working to understand the pain points that each group faced throughout the process. For professors, almost every aspect of creating, maintaining, and consuming the information gathered through the peer evaluation process was cumbersome. Professors were often forced to use rudimentary methods not suited for usage as a peer evaluation tool, often customizing them and inadvertently spending significant time in order to transform them into suitable tools for evaluating their students. Furthermore, from an analysis perspective, professors ultimately had to wrestle through the data collected in order to aggregate averages, understand potential red flags within a group (under performers), and address an arising student issues or comments described within a group.

User Research

After providing an initial MVP experience with a handful of professors in fall 2020, we realized there was additional potential for the platform with a slightly expanded feature set. For spring 2021, we found that providing professors with additional customization options (beyond our default question templates we had initially launched) allowed them to customize the layout and order of each question, providing a more tailored and seamless student experience. We further explored these customization options, as we began to understand another need within the evaluation space develop: a directional-based means of evaluating peers, where different peers within a group may receive different questions based on their role in that group. This ultimately informed us of building a version of the platform to support role-based responses, opening up additional options and ways for professors to better tailor their peer evaluation process to their students.

Design Approach

Ultimately, the CoStudy student experience balanced three different layouts for students to be able to 1) view different evaluations assigned to them within their course, 2) complete each evaluation as either a reflection of themselves or upon their peers, and 3) review and understand insights as they pertain to their personal development within the course. Providing an approach that was thoughtful and left students with a feeling of completion after viewing, evaluating, and reflecting upon their insights was important, so the focus remained on designing an approach that allowed an easy transition between the few pages available.

On the professor side, however, the concern was primarily focused on guiding them through an intuitive experience for 1) setting up their course, 2) adding and configuring different evaluations for the course, 3) getting students onboarded into their respective groups, and 3) ultimately reviewing and evaluating students in their course on their submitted evaluations. By providing professors with an easy-to-understand checklist for getting started with their course as well as intuitive walk-throughs placed in thoughtful locations throughout the interface, professors were able to better understand the functionality and capabilities of the evaluations they create as well as how to understand the results from evaluation.

Outcomes

CoStudy is a huge product that I have had the privilege of working on from its very inception. Brock and I spun out an idea for completely different tool after a creative hackathon to better connect students on campus based on availability and shared interests to its current state, as a complex and powerful student evaluation tool that professors across the country to utilize and replace other more expensive software like Qualtrics. Having such a high-touch role in the development of the product has allowed me to synthesize user research from dozens and dozens of user interviews (both professor and student), hone in on a specific problem-solution fit, and ultimately design and develop a product that provides integral value and serves as immense time-saver for professors throughout the semester.