Understanding the problem space

Fixing things that don’t seem to work

While you can use the design process to identify issues you are generally not aware of, often we already know when there is something that is not working as desired in our learning and teaching.

The flags in these situations are often fairly clear:

• Students don’t interact with something that has been created.
• Students don’t understand something that we feel that we have provided adequate information to understand.
• Student Experience Survey results don’t match with expectations.
• Low levels of engagement/interaction with the course.
• Teaching team staff seem like they are doing a lot of additional work.
• Teaching staff frequently voice their frustration around a particular expectation or process.

In these situations we can use a human centred design process to look in greater depth at the situation and determine some levers we might be able to use to resolve issues or alter behaviours.

User responsibility/our responsibility?

When talking about resolving issues around learning and teaching (and mapping a problem space) it’s worth taking a moment to consider responsibility. While there can be a tendency to attribute the issue to a user not doing something that they are meant to be doing (‘students don’t read the feedback I give them’), this is a place where we need to take a leaf from the design handbook – we have to remember that ‘it is never the user’s fault’. As a designer you can’t write off poor use of something you have created as a result of the user’s lack of appropriate action (‘they just need to look a bit harder to find the start button’). We need to take wider user requirements into context as best we can when designing a solution.

This however needs to be balanced with the fact that neither is it entirely your fault/responsibility. There are inevitably underlying systemic issues that any one individual may not be able to change through their actions (ie., students prefer to leave their zoom cameras off because they rather the anonymity and there is the weight of social conformity). While the ultimate issue might not be within the scope of your learning interaction/initiative to solve, knowing this is the wider issue and working as best as possible with other levers one can actually manipulate, is more effective and rewarding than writing off the issue as the user’s lack of interest in being responsible/coming to the table.