Helping Students Improve Public Speaking Skills

UX Research
User Journey Mapping
Wireframing

This project aims to help students improve their public speaking skills, while fostering social connectedness and reducing presentation anxiety. 

Pitch video

My Role

• Conducted UX research
• Created user persona & user journey maps 
• Synthesized data 
• Ideated & wireframed solutions
• Created medium-fidelity clickable prototype
• Conducted usability testing with prototype
• Created pitch video to showcase product

Tools

• Balsamiq
• Miro 
• Adobe CC
• Google Workspace

Secondary Research

Fear of public speaking affects 70% of people (Montopoli, 2017) [Public speaking skills are] important in the workplace (Lorenz, 2018)

Presenting in a less familiar language adds pressure (Elliot & Chong, 2005)

Survey question results for “How do you feel when you have an upcoming presentation?”

Primary Research

Interview: 10 participants

• 9/10 participants interviewed expressed feelings of anxiety before and during presentations

• 3/10 participants reported feeling embarrassed when asking to practice a presentation with a friend

Survey: 68 participants

• 78% of participants stated that giving presentations makes them feel nervous.

• 71% of participants favoured in-person presentations over online

• 51% of participants expressed concern regarding their
confidence

Persona

Based on our user research we developed a persona: Anita the anxious presenter.

As-is Scenario

I sketched a draft of the as-is scenario

We used our persona to construct an As-Is scenario,which allowed us to pinpoint Anita’s pain points.

We identified Anita’s 4 major needs through crafting needs statements based on her persona and the pain points identified in her as-is scenario.

Need 1: Social Connectedness
Need 2: Feedback
Need 3: Anxiety Mitigation
Need 4: Meaningful Practice

To-be Scenario

I ideated design solutions and used a prioritization grid to assess the impact and feasibility of each idea. We voted on ideas to take forward and implemented them into a to-be scenario, which demonstrates how Anita’s journey would be improved with our solutions.

Prototyping

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We started with a low fidelity paper wireframe of the website, and developed a sequential storyboard to imagine Anita’s complete interaction.

Sign-In-Page
Homepage-for-video-Alternate-472n
Calendar---avail3
Calendar--avail5-copy
Self-Preparation
Prep-tips
Self-Preparation-copy
Self-Practice
Self-Practice---Start-Recording
Self-Practice---Stop-recording
Self-Practice-copy-2
Self-Practice--save-confirmation
Self-Practice--finish
Inbox-Recordings-copy
Inbox
Health-Tip
back-to-inbox
Inbox-Recordings-copy-3
Select-Practice-Partner-copy
Select-Practice-Partner
Homepage---Inbox---New-Message-session-confirmation
Peer-Practice-Confirmation
Homepage-cal-notification

We used the feedback generated by our lean evaluation to create a fully-clickable medium fidelity prototype of the website in Balsamiq. We used this prototype to conduct our usability testing.

Usability Testing

Affinity diagram used for qualitative analysis of usability testing results

4 participants

Methods: think aloud observation & interview

Likes:

• feedback from peer-practice mode
• matching feature
• layout
• healthy tips

Criticisms:

• calendar matching system
• video interface

Recommendations:

• interactive calendar
• search feature to find & match with specific users
• video interface should be consistent in every practice mode

Lessons Learned

Communication is everything when it comes to working in a team. This was my first time working on a UX project with a group dynamic. I learned that the success of the project depends on building strong team relationships.

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