Low-Fi Prototype

CS492 Crowdsourcing - Final Project: Milestone 4 (2016-11-10)


A. Problem Identification

PROBLEM STATEMENT & GOAL

What is the problem our team is trying to solve?

Our solution: Let's think about a study group using smartphones

Why do we use crowdsourcing for the problem?


B. Tasks

BRIEF SUMMARY

Name of platform: 1-Day-N-Questions (N can be an arbitrary number)

Our platform utilizes crowdsourcing technique to address issues of the fairness of education. Our main goal is to offer equal opportunity to learners based on crowdsourced knowledge. Our system basically supports learners just like a study-group system. More specifically, Every user can be both a requester and a worker, and each user receive help from (or offer help to) other users over our platform. The users can benefit from not only sharing their customized problems, but also managing their own learning history. Lastly, for the sake of implementation-level simplicity, we only focus on English-related problems, such as English words, phrases, and sentences.

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TASK 1. Making a New Problem

About Task 1:

In order to get answers of a given problem, the first thing we have to do is to make (or write) a new problem. For an easy process of problem making, a specific type of question should be defined by our platform and intuitive user interface should also be provided. Our platform mainly supports English-related problems and each problem can be easily customized by a problem provider. Afterwards, the written problem is released to unspecified learners (crowds) through our platform, and those who receive the problem will try to solve it [Task 2].

Requirements:

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TASK 2. Solving and Evaluating Problems + Checking My Groups & Study History

About Task 2:

In order to solve problems, the system should let the other users receive the problems first. For the ease of use, this process should be automatically done by the system. For example, an alarm system can be one possible approach for this sub-task. After the receive, the system should provide an interface for solve the problems. The interface should be simple and the process must not demand much typing because the system is mobile-based. Lastly, the system should give the users a way to evaluate the given problems. Additionally, a learner need learning record to estimate academic achievements, to schedule study plan, and, to motivate his/her learning.

Requirements:

C. Prototype

BRIEF SUMMARY

For the success of the platform to solve the problems stated, evaluations to check the effectiveness of the idea and the usability are necessary. However, it would cost too much and be unnecessary to construct full platform for user evaluations in a developing phase, because what we want to be evaluated are only core parts of the platform. Therefore, it would be better to create a prototype for a platform and get evaluated. Fortunately, there are variety of platforms and services which help developers to create their own prototypes, such as proto.io, Marvel, and so on.

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PROTOTYPING TOOL

Choice of the tool: Marvel

Official Website: https://www.marvelapp.com

Four criteria are used to choose the prototyping tool: easeness, fanciness, scalability, and additional features. Marvel provides GUI, which does not need any coding knowledge, for developers who want to create prototypes. Moreover, it provides various fancy designs and enables .psd formats to be used so developers can create fancy prototypes. Marvel also gives PC, iPhone, iPad, and Android frames so developers do not have to worry about what if there is no appropriate frame for the prototype. In addition, the platform enables to import images from dropbox, so efficient development of prototype is possible for the team, as we have done most of works on dropbox.

What worked well with Marvel:

As described above, Marvel enables us to provide a prototype in short amount of time with nice visualization. Moreover, it provides smartphone interface so the easeness on the prototype creation improved.

What did NOT work well with Marvel:

First, due to its simpleness, the platform does not provide detailed situations, such as typing a text. Moreover, as it is mere a prototype, we cannot provide an algorithm onto a prototype, which helps the platform to provide user-based experience. In addition, Marvel does not provide smartphone-based prototype usage unless spending money. Although using the link we can play the prototype test through the smartphone, this made inconvenience.

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Design Choices

Choice of elements NOT to implement:

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Screenshots of Important Scenes in Prototype

Screenshots for Task 1

Screenshots for Task 2

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Instructions for User Feedback

Purpose

Task 1: Submitting a question (15 min.)

Task 2: Solving & evaluating a question

Questionnaire (for each task or situation)


D. User Feedback

Four users attended for the task. While two people (Sangyoon, Minchul) are not that familar with English, two others (Yeseul and Jungmin) undergraduated from department of English studies or undergraduated from US college. Through the test from diverse samples, the team can get various comments of the platform which can help us to improve the platform.

To summarize, there are number of criticisms on the hint or tag in problem making process. Moreover, mumber of additions on the platform are recommended: the expansion of platform to widget, enabling google search, taking picture for making a question, and so on. Less texts on UI and gamification are also recommended by testers.

User Feedback Summary