Battered Women’s Justice Project
The Battered Women’s Justice Project (BWJP) combats gender-based violence by offering continuing legal education for attorneys, advocates, law enforcement, judges, and allied professionals to support survivors and foster systemic change. The BWJP needs a custom learning management system (LMS) to offer remote and self-paced courses during the pandemic and beyond. The LMS must host content, track and provide user certification, and allow for multi-tool integration while adhering to accessibility standards. Our UX team is here to build the LMS from scratch so the organization may meet these needs.
Tools: Figma, Google Sheets, Invision, Trello, Otter, and Zoom.
Methods: scoping, personas, competitive analysis, survey, contextual inquiry, directed storytelling, stakeholder interviews, card sorting, secondary research, and usability testing.
Deliverables: annotated wireframes, workflows, a summary of research, high-fidelity prototypes, interactive prototypes, and video walkthrough of materials.
My Responsibilities: research, lead usability tester, moderator, a summary of research, user personas, workflows, protocols, and scriptwriting.
Requirements
Workflow mapping
Secondary research around court professionals
Iterative prototyping
Concept evaluations
Accessibility ADA/508 compliant design
Compatible with Articulate 360
Automated Learner evaluations
Research
Stakeholder Meetings
A kick-off and mid-point meeting with stakeholders helped set expectations, explore features, critique work, and prioritize.
Insights into the work and culture of administrators was a pleasant takeaway from these engagements as well.
Secondary Research
Our team performed secondary research on continuing legal education, competitors, accessibility compliance, and the integration of Articulate360 to foster foundational knowledge on which we could base our designs.
Accessibility Consults
Our team consulted with two accessibility subject matter experts to ensure that our designs aligned with rules and regulations while adhering to good design practices.
All designs were deemed compliant.
During these discussions, it became apparent that we were only in control of accessibility to a point. That we can design for accessibility, but how a developer implements it is out of our hands.
Survey
We posted an LMS survey to an instructional design and e-learning forum to gain insights into what users like and dislike about existing learning management systems currently on the market.
Those who participated were explicit in not wanting, desiring, or requiring a peer-to-peer messaging system although this was a feature the client desired.
Contextual Inquiry
Our team performed a contextual inquiry with a BWJP Trainer to conceptualize their ethnographic context and accurately inform our Trainer persona's goals and obstacles. This session lasted an hour and allowed us to unearth some of the following insights:
BWJP webinars have been conducted using Zoom, but its available features do not support the complete workflow of a Trainer. The Trainer is consequently over-burdened with juggling between multiple manual tasks that distract from their primary work.
Trainers are working in a remote context using their own unique processes to complete objectives, whereas the introduction of an LMS would build toward a uniform method of reaching goals. As a consequence, training the Trainers becomes more feasible.
Card Sort & Directed Storytelling
Card sorting had users categorize features and tasks so that we may gain insight into how they are grouped within the user's mind.
This data directly informed the structure of our workflows. The more the architecture mirrors users' mental models, the more intuitive and natural the workflow becomes.
Throughout the card sorting experiments, it was beginning to become apparent that the user population on both the learner and the trainer sides varied dramatically when it came to technological comfort/literacy. The need for a design with low technical complexity was a consistent request and piece of cautionary advice provided by all participants.
Usability Testing
Usability testing involves letting users run various tasks on an interactive prototype of the LMS to demonstrate what is working and what is not working with the design and information architecture.
Five individuals were asked to navigate our initial iteration of the LMS and were then asked to rate how intuitive it was. Our first iteration comes with an intuitiveness score of 8.1 on a ten-point scale.
Interviews with participants still emphasized making the system more minimalistic. Users want the LMS to feature explicit instructions and alerts to assist individuals with low technological literacy. These insights were used to generate the second iteration of the LMS design.
Personas
The Learner
Barbara is an attorney with goals to complete mandatory continuing legal education credits by remotely taking social justice-focused courses. In-person CLE courses are rare in the pandemic era, and worse yet, Barbara finds herself with little extended free time to take an entire class in one sitting.
The Trainer
Tasha is involved in the fight against gender-based violence by performing remote education for the BWJP. But the remote work has been demanding, and she desires a more efficient way of delivering course content. Currently, she has to juggle multiple programs like Zoom and Excel to track her data and finds the technology aspects of her job overwhelming.
Workflows
The Learner and Trainer workflows were informed by research gained through card sorting, stakeholder meetings, contextual inquiry, secondary research, and directed storytelling.
An automated course authorization process was implemented, which checked the Learner's demographic information against course requirements to ensure proper enrollment (e.g., you must have a bar I.D. to register for this course).
A second information architecture diagram was produced for Trainers of the LMS, given that they have different access to information and responsibilities than the Learner.
Presentation
LMS Prototypes
Explore our Learning Management System from the perspective of a Learner or Trainer.
The Trainer
The Learner
Conclusions
We must provide ongoing training to promote systemic change in the battle against gender-based violence. We must educate those in the courtroom attempting to balance the scales of justice. For some, this is a matter of life or death. For all, it is a matter that demands reflection. No human being deserves to suffer, and every human being deserves to have their truth told. Our team is proud of our UX contribution to this cause.