Project Description: Based on the 2012 Gallup Student Poll survey, student engagement is dropping each school year. HistoBox is a tool designed to assist middle school teachers to college professors in creating an engaging and interactive lesson plan.

Role: Product Designer and UX Researcher

Tools: AdobeXD

Time Duration: 3 days

Adobe and HISTORY hosted a 3-day national design competition called Adobe Creative Jam LIVE. I worked with two designers, Tyler Matsuzaki and Emily Pi, on creating a solution to the design challenge.

Use HISTORY’s deep catalog of video and editorial content to create a teaching and learning experience, ultimately resulting in a HISTORY Classroom app. The conceptual mobile app you create will result in a teaching tool for K-12 teachers OR a research tool for students at any level.

HistoBox is a tool designed to assist middle school teachers to college professors in creating an engaging and interactive lesson plan. Our app integrates HISTORY’s extensive video resources and provides interactive games to not only help students learn lessons based on state-specific teaching standards but also create an enjoyable classroom experience.

I interviewed teachers to learn about their experience with creating lesson plans. Two key insights that we gained:

I explored the internet to find more information on some of the challenges teachers may face while teaching history. One interesting statistic I found was about how student engagement drops each school year.

With student engagement dropping each school year, how can we design a tool for middle school to college teachers that assists them in creating an engaging and interactive history lesson plan?

To begin, we engaged in a BrainWriting exercise to generate key app features.

After generating an extensive list of feature ideas, we then used a prioritization matrix to determine which ideas were both highly valuable to the user and highly feasible. Based on our discussion, we wanted to create an app that included these features:

To structure our application, we created a product sitemap that would include our key features.

My team and I then engaged in many iterations of low fidelity wireframing.

After developing a vision with wireframes, we dived into AdobeXD to prototype our app. During prototyping, we followed the design guidelines provided by HISTORY. I worked mainly on the home, create a lesson plan, and recommended content screens.

One key takeaway is the value of understanding the people you’re designing for. During a 3 day design sprint, it can be very easy to rush into prototyping. However, my team and I took the time to learn more about teachers and the challenges they face while creating lesson plans. With a solid foundation of research and problem comprehension, our team was able to design a solution to help teachers and improve the classroom experience.