How Might We Make Reading Engaging for University Students?

Secondary Reserach

Less than 30% of undergraduate students complete required readings

and from 2012 to 2022, there was an 8% decrease in the number of adults in the United States who read one or more books, According to the National Endowment of the Arts.

Reading and writing are the most accessible and fastest forms of mass communication and learning, vital to both students and adults throughout their careers.

According to Kerr, there are four main factors behind college students’ lack of reading:

1. Unprepared-ness
2. Lack of motivation
3. Time constraints
4. Underestimation of reading importance

We wanted to disrupt this decline and make reading engaging for university students.

Contextual Inquiry

Thinking “Outside the Book” and into the Context of Student Studying

To understand whether or not students complete their assigned readings for class and what factors go into why, we performed contextual inquiry and interviews.

We recruited four undergraduate students from a variety of academic backgrounds and levels of enjoyment of reading:

To get as close to their typical reading environment as possible, we asked participants to bring an assigned reading and we met them where they typically do their reading assignments and observed them reading.

Afterwards, we asked questions to understand their feelings about their assigned readings, what motivated them, what successes they had, obstacles they faced, and personal reading skills and tools they had developed, based on our observations.

Analysis

Reading Between the Lines

After downloading our data and affinity diagramming, we found some high level patterns:

We found that students developed their own personal reading tools and strategies.

Physical Reading Tools:

• Docs for note-taking on computer, Legal pad
• Pen, highlighter
• Physical printed copies of readings

Mental Reading Strategies:

• Setting expectations for reading depth based on assignment
• Identifying key concepts based on structure of reading (skimming)
• “Pre-reading” to identify key concepts in larger reading
• Creating environment conducive to focus
• Time Blocking

Notably, the purpose of these tools, as described by the participants, is not to understand the reading better, but to get started and stay engaged with the reading.

Students need clear reading expectations and goals, because they struggle to get started when they don't know the expected depth of understanding.

Students need to stay engaged while reading, because they struggle to get started again once they’ve lost focus.

AI Design

Designing a reading “AI”de

Our team was tasked with using AI to solve the students’ needs. Rather than slapping a chatbot onto our solution, we looked to the intersection of applications of AI and the students’ needs and reading habits we discovered.

We found that students placed the most trust in AI to:

1. Summarize and label large bodies of text
2. Identify key concepts
3. Visualize information
4. Predict trends
5. Input and output information in different formats and modalities

Our team sought to design a tool that, rather than doing the critical thinking and comprehension for them, helped students engage with the text.

Ideation

No Writer’s Block Here!

In our ideation phase, we discussed the intersection of user’s reading needs and AI capabilities, gamification, ways to reduce intimidation, pre-reading strategies, helping users identify key concepts, mappings between reading strategies and input and output modalities, and helping users leave the reading experience feeling successful so that they feel capable before starting their next reading.

Chris developed two prototypes for silly/potentially outrageous ideas. These prototypes allowed us to gauge the boundary between approachable and empowering versus silly and belittling to address the user pain of reading intimidation.

Marcus developed a prototype for the pre-reading process to test our design goal of alleviating challenges to starting the reading by incorporating features that help students set reading expectations to reduce the intimidation factor associated with academic readings.

We mapped our digital active reading prototypes to the way students organized their physical space while reading:

Kylee focused on the user experience of active reading, prototyping a reading dashboard that helped us test our design goal of assisting in improving reading attention and active engagement.

I developed a prototype that focused on a user flow encompassing pre-reading, active reading, and final reflection. We used this prototype to gauge whether our prototype’s flow matched users’ reading workflow and whether they were able to understand the mental model we created to match the digital reading experience to their physical active reading process.

To check out all low-fidelity prototypes for yourself, click here !

Iteration

Another Edit Pass

After presenting our low-fidelity prototypes to students, we found that the user flow and spacial organization of our designs resonated with them and matched their mental model.

Our prototypes showed promise of helping students stay engaged with the reading. We found that students preferred the AI features that were well defined and had less open-eneded input. They looked for some playfulness in the theme and styles of the interface, but ultimately wanted the key features to be serious and functional in nature.

As a team, we also performed a heuristic evaluation focusing on the usability measures we felt best accounted for the user needs of an engaging and approachable tool: aesthetic and minimalist design, match between system and the real world, consistency and standards, flexibility and efficiency of use, and error recovery.

Based on our feedback and evaluation, we made the following updates to our prototypes:

• Enforcing consistency in AI outputs rather than placing weight on users to verify
• More obvious affordances to undo, go back, and save progress
• More interactive features that are multiple choice rather than open-ended
• More squirrel imagery

Character Design

The Supporting Character

Although the squirrel imagery was a small part of our prototypes, it stood out to every person we interviewed.

Students saw the squirrel as a supportive and motivating figure, akin to studying with a friend. We leaned into this theme and I developed a set of consistent imagery of a squirrel working to act as a role model and friend.

I used a sleek design with limited colors to keep an approachable character look that delights with a professional level of quality that students would not be embarassed to use in public.

We used the squirrel sparingly, at key moments in the study experience where a friend might typically be involved: setting pre-reading goals and during post-study celebration and reflection to help make the study experience more approachable and memorable.

High Fidelity

The Final Chapter

View final prototype