I am in a graduate program at Utah State University working toward my masters degree in Education.  I am currently in a design team that has been challenged to help a company that creates educational games and tools with their research sign up process.  

Each member of the design team took the lead for each part of the project, creating and running meetings, communicating with the team, and submitting assignments.

Age of Learning recruits K-12 teachers for their research.  They send out a survey to teachers to see if they meet the criteria for their studies.  Currently, since the sign-up process is on a first-come, first-serve basis, teachers in earlier time-zones are able to sign up before teachers in later time-zones, since they finish teaching earlier in the day.   

The challenge is:  can a sign up process be designed that is equitable for all teachers, no matter what time zone they live in, while still having a short turn around? 

This is our design team's idea and process...

Bonnie gets to work, gets out her laptop and opens the email with the pool of data from survey applicants.  She finds and enters the data for the research group.  The system generates random sample from research pool that matches demographics.  She reviews data and makes any changes needed.  She makes sure the candidates are widely represented by the demographics.  Then she delivers the info to the researchers.

The next step in our design process is a wireframe or blueprint of an online sign up experience.  It is meant to be a simple sketch so that lots of feedback can be freely given to make it a great design.

Please click on the picture to see entire wireframe and to zoom in to see more info.

Think Ironman movies when you think of prototypes!  That's what I did!  Our team took the feedback from interviewing a few people and experience we learned through our design process and created our prototype.  Our prototype is our first final model of the real thing.

I am Ironman...