Mind Mints - Inclusive & Accessible Educational App for Users with Special Needs; Design Thesis Project
Software: Figma, Quant UX, Useberry
Skills: User Experience Design, User Interface Design, Focus Group Testing, Information Gathering (Interviews & Primary Research)
Date: January 2023 - May 2023
My project ‘Mind Mints’ is an educational app that is customised to a user with special educational need’s learning method through personalized user interface styles. My project aims to tackle the challenges faced by students with special educational needs or learning difficulties such as apps with poor useability, low user retention and low navigation. My user group is users with low-support educational needs such as ADHD/ ADD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, colour blindness or interface challenges. As per expert appraisal, the three different learning styles that should be offered on my app are divided into global learners, kinaesthetic learners, and sequential learners. Followed by user interface styles that have different variables of font, colour scheme, navigation, iconography to understand how they affect useability and concentration on my app. Eventually, the final product consists of a team of data scientist experts and educational instructors to assess the best learner style and interface for a user. Thereafter, a custom design system will be created such as style A3 (e.g Sequential Learner, Interface style 3).
‘Mind Mints’ will act as a stand-alone app that users can use to determine their optimal learning style and interface style for each different subject as. Additionally, they can monitor their test scores, speed of answering questions and progress report for each subject and style. Afterwards, through a consultation with an instructor and a data scientist if required, they get design system codes that the app can be viewed through. Eventually, ‘Mind Mints’ can be used a plug-in for other educational software to change the display of information and the interface style of other educational apps such as Quizlet, Kahoot or Khan Academy. Hence, this is a service design consultancy approach to re-imagine the process of online education and independent learning virtually.
The design decisions are driven from web accessibility principles, research consolidation from students, parents, teachers of special educational needs, non-profit organizations and journals. My app aims to promote independent learning through the educational platform, allow equal opportunity for users to learn who may not have the best access to education, and to empower users to be more confident in their educational journey. To measure the success of my app, there will be a user testing process to evaluate my cause-and-effect that enhanced, personalized user interface styles can help users with ADHD/ ADD higher knowledge retention. The fixed variable will be the learning style which will be chosen by an educational expert, the independent variable will be a set of interface styles provided, and the dependent variable will the results to recognize which style a user has scored higher in.
Below are Examples of my Prototype Demos
User Experience Research Process
Hypothesis Testing
As per the data collected, it can be seen that 75% global learners scored higher with User Interface style 1 with a more whimsical style, followed by 25% who enjoyed balanced Style 2, whilst no global learner scored better with a monotone style of learning.
Whilst kinaesthetic learners had an equal balance of the optimal learning style of whimsical and balanced of 50% and 41.7%. Followed by a less preference, of 8.3% learners scoring higher with learning style 2.
Next, the only time that Style 3 which was monotone, was scored higher in was for 58.3% of sequential learners, followed by 33.3% of learners still preferring a whimsical style, and colourful Style 1 scoring higher for only 8.3% of learners.
