Today I would like to share an assignment from the Interaction Design course. Back in July 2020, I started participating in this online course on Coursera. The course is actually an online specialization consisting of 8 single courses. Each of them can be enrolled separately and takes about 4-5 weeks following a determined schedule with assignments and deadlines. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer accessible and affordable remote learning opportunities to students all over the world. I found it pretty amazing! As a global society, getting an education has become increasingly important, but increasingly difficult beyond the high school level. Institutions of higher education present the obstacles of entrance examinations, tuition, distance, living expenses, and so much more. The course I attended counted more than 4000 classmates from all over the world and gave me the chance to listen to a professor from the University of California, San Diego, the creator and publisher of the course. I had access to knowledge, information, and inspiration, which I probably wouldn’t have had in a non-digital world. The assignment is from the specialization’s third course “Social Computing”. Project overview: Pick a crowdsourcing platform and spend at least half an hour doing crowd work on it. You’ll need to sign up for the platform of your choice and complete some tasks. Along the way, you could earn some extra money or advance human knowledge. This could be a citizen science platform or a paid crowdsourcing platform. Some examples you might consider include Foldit, MechanicalTurk, Upwork, Wikipedia, Duolingo, Lab-in-the-wild. Afterward, find a discussion forum for that platform. It could be a third-party site like Turkopticon, or a built-in forum like a Wikipedia Talk page. Get a sense of the discussion themes, as you’ll be reporting on them. My submission: Your submission for this assignment consists of two parts. The first will be a text response to the questions below. Your answers should be numbered in correspondence with the question answered. The second will be a set of 3-5 screenshots in pdf form that capture your experience using the crowdsourcing platform. 1. List the URL of the crowdsourcing platform https://www.duolingo.com/learn 2. Describe your experience in 3-4 sentences Straightforward to use Motivating Entertaining 3. In 2-3 sentences describe what was the hardest thing to figure out on the site. No-Human Interaction Not Enough Control Over Vocabulary Topics Some Sentences are Unnatural 4. On a scale of 1-10 (1 being least, 10 being most), how much did you enjoy the experience? 10 5. In 2-3 sentences answer the question: If you could change one aspect of the platform, what would it be? In the long run, making and re-making the same exercises can become a bit boring. Therefore I would try to internalize sentences with context. I would also add the possibility to speak and/or read. I'd try to live the language as much as possible. 6. List the URL of a forum post that you thought was particularly interesting. https://forum.duolingo.com/ 7. In 2-3 sentences describe why you thought this forum post was particularly interesting. The forum gives new online visitors, clients, and potential customers a reason to return to Duolingo. In general, forums are ideal to provide your community with a way to connect to each other. 8. In five years, will crowdsourcing be more popular or less? Answer on a scale from 1-7: 1 significantly less popular, 4 no change, 7 significantly more popular. 4-5 9. In 2-3 sentences describe your reasoning for your answer to question 8. Crowdsourcing models are great in many aspects. But also brings many potential difficulties. One of the biggest is that it can be used to exploit desperate people by offering minimal or unfair rewards. 10. Please upload a pdf containing at least 3 screenshots of your experiences on a crowdsourcing platform. Duolingo recognizes that language learners need to be motivated to make sure they come back to the app and engage in some more language fun. Duolingo uses several different methods to keep you hooked. Visual Learning A lot of the learning that goes on in Duolingo is visual. There are pictures for learning vocabulary, colors that indicate whether you’re right or wrong, and highlighted tappable text for new words or grammar points. If you’re a visual learner like me, you’ll love it. A Beautiful Interface I just love everything about the sleek interface of Duolingo. One of my favorite things is the little turtle button that allows you to listen to ‘slow’ pronunciations of the word or phrase. This creepily slow voice is a very useful feature in the exercises that ask you to type what you hear: Weekly leaderboards Here is when learning becomes fun and entertaining, Leaderboard is a new experience where you can compete with other Duos in a league. Each weekly league starts every Monday at 12 am UTC. You will be paired with 30 new Duos each week. You can earn XP and rise in the ranks of your leaderboard. Then the top ten XP performers of that league will be “promoted” to a higher tier for the next week. The bottom ten XP performers will be demoted to the previous tier. Finally, regardless of the assignment, I would like to share few notes from the course. Crowdsourcing vs. Crowdfunding While crowdsourcing seeks information or work product, crowdfunding seeks money to support individuals, charities, or startup companies. People can contribute to crowdfunding requests with no expectation of repayment, or companies can offer shares of the business to contributors. Benefits of Crowdsourcing The advantages of crowdsourcing include cost savings, speed, and the ability to work with people who have skills that an in-house team may not have. If a task typically takes one employee a week to perform, a business can cut the turnaround time to a matter of hours by breaking the job up into many smaller parts and giving those segments to a crowd of workers. Companies that need some jobs done only on occasions, such as coding or graphic design, can crowdsource those tasks and avoid the expense of a full-time in-house employee. Example of Crowdsourcing Many types of jobs can be crowdsourced, including website creation and transcription. Companies that want to design new products often turn to the crowd for opinions. Rather than rely on small focus groups, companies can reach millions of consumers through social media, ensuring that the business obtains opinions from a variety of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Photo by Jonas Denil on Unsplash

In order to create better products, designers must understand what’s going on in the user’s world and understand how their products can make the user’s life better. And that’s where storyboards come in. We all know the value of user interviews or personas. We agree that testing is a crucial part of product design. In contrast, people do not commonly use storyboarding, even though it can help in many situations. Storyboards show what a design enables the user to accomplish without specifying a particular user interface. Why use a storyboard? There are many ways to tell a story. The impact of showing a user persona as they walk through the experience is a way to understand and have more context. A storyboard is a way to communicate and does not have to focus on illustration as a skill set. Instead, it helps to focus on what the priorities are for users. Storyboards in UX design are engaging even with minimal sketches, and they are flexible. They can be erased, drawn over, made in pencil, and modified, as they are not finite in form. A storyboard in UX will help create insight into the user’s experience and should be made with a goal in mind for the team. Why does storytelling matter in UX? Stories are an effective and inexpensive way to capture, convey and explore experiences in the design process. In UX design, this technique has the following benefits: Human-centered approach Storyboards put people at the heart of the design process. They put a human face on analytics data and research findings. Forces thinking about user flow Designers are able to walk in the shoes of their users and see the products in a similar light. This helps designers to understand existing scenarios of interaction, as well as to test hypotheses about potential scenarios. Prioritizes what’s important Storyboards also reveal what you don’t need to spend money on. Thanks to them, you can cut out a lot of unnecessary work. Allows for “pitch and critique” method Storyboarding is a team-based activity, and everyone on a team can contribute to it (not just designers). Similar to the movie industry, each scene should be critiqued by all team members. Approaching UX with storytelling inspires collaboration. This can spark new design concepts. When to storyboard Storyboarding earlier on in the design process is a good way to ensure the user needs are being considered. Storyboarding is also a way to ensure that you are building an accessible experience when the inclusive design is a part of the goal. It’s done early on to gather insights from the team to see if everyone is striving towards the same goal. Storyboarding is useful for participatory design. Participatory design involves all parties (stakeholders, UI and UX designers, developers, researchers) in the design process, to ensure that the result is as good as possible. It can also be helpful during design sprints and hackathons, when the prototype is being built by multiple people in a very short time. Communicating design decisions with a storyboard really come in handy. How to work out a story structure? If you are going to create a visual representation of stories to communicate user issues to others, there’s some preparation to be done to make them logical, understandable, and convincing in their arguments. Each story should have the following essential elements: Character: The specific persona involved in your story. Their behaviors, appearance, and expectations, as well as any decisions they make along the way, are very important. Revealing what is going on in your character’s mind is essential to a successful illustration of their experience in the storyboard. Scene: It’s an environment that the character finds herself in (real-world contexts that involve place and people). Plot: All too often you designers jump straight into explaining the details of their design without first explaining the back story. Don’t be one of them — your story must be created with a structure in mind, there should be an obvious beginning, middle, and end. The narrative that unfolds in your storyboard should focus on a goal for the character. The plot should start with a specific trigger and end with either the benefit of the solution or a problem that the character is left with. Try using Freytag’s Pyramid in structuring your plot. Stories tend to follow a narrative structure that looks a lot like a pyramid. Freytag’s Pyramid, showing the five parts or acts: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action (or final suspense and resolution), and Denouement (Conclusion). Ben Crothers added a quick story into the pyramid about a guy and his phone that won’t work. Storyboard Template. Image credit Nielsen Norman Group. To make your story powerful, try to make it as much authentic as possible. The main thing is to make the character, their goal, and what happens in their experience as clear as possible. Also, cut out any unnecessary extras. No matter how good a sentence, picture, or page maybe, if it doesn’t add value to the overall message, you should remove it. Finally, it’s essential to communicate the emotional state of your character throughout their experience. Remember to always use storyboards to illustrate experiences. Add emotions to your story. Add emoticons to each step, to help others get a feel for what’s going on inside the character’s head. Remember to illustrate any reactions to success/pain points along the way. Smile and sadness on human faces can add emotions to your story and it comes alive in the hearts and minds of your audience. Image credit: Chelsea Hostetter, Austin Center for Design Photo by Matt Popovich on Unsplash