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ARISA Lab
The Eclipse Soundscapes:
Citizen Science Project

This is a group project that provided suggestions to ARISA Lab's initiative in order to make learning about the October 2023 annual solar eclipse and April 2024 total eclipse more accessible and engaging for the general public.

 

"ES:CSP is a NASA Science Activation funded project that is studying how eclipses affect life on Earth."

Timeline

March - April, 2022

Team Role

I contributed to the UX research, UI, user persona, user journey, writing the research insights, and overall presentation. I also helped to project manage and organizing materials for the client. Individually, I created the style guide, mockups, and made the proposal more accessible (both visually and through practical design principles).

Stakeholders

NASA Science Activation funded project under ARISA Lab, LLC

Problem

How can we design an inclusive and accessible education experience to help middle school students engage with the eclipse?

Solution

  • Universal Learning Design Principles

  • Existing mental models

  • Information structure

    • Hierarchy​

    • Chunking

    • Bullet points!

Planning

We asked some questions to the client to prepare for our design process.

 

  1. What is the current status of content for lessons and where can we access it?

  2. What is your anticipated target audience for the Citizen Science Learning experience?

  3. What are some of the sources for your educational content?

  4. Are there any learning resources that you think are achieving a successful learning experience for a similar audience?

  5. On pages with videos, is text supplementary or a summary?

Process

One of ARISA Lab's anticipations for this project was that the target audience would be around middle school or 8th grade reading level, so we began our process with doing a user persona based around that.

1. User Persona

Arisa ESCS Pitch Deck.png

Our group first came up with a user persona to design for. Meet Jack.

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Jack is a 12 years old middle school student living in New York City with full vision impairment. He is a part of the science club and likes listening to marine mammal frequencies and learning about the way they communicate with each other. He also likes playing the piano, sculpting clay, and doing science experiments. Recently, he learned about solar eclipses, but due to his disability he feels that he will be unable to fully experience one.

 

Jack's frustrations include:

  • Inability to participate fully in all the same activities as his sighted friends (esp sports)

  • Navigating spaces not suited for the visually impaired

  • Navigating new spaces he is not used to

  • Interacting with non-inclusive media

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His goals include:

  • Wanting to find a way to learn more about solar eclipses (on an Apprentice* level)

  • A way to engage with his friends about similar interests

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*The Apprentice level is one of five roles that people can assume to participate in the Eclipse Soundscapes project. Apprentices participate by learning about eclipses. For more information on the role, visit https://eclipsesoundscapes.org/roles/#apprentice-role.

Arisa ESCS Pitch Deck.png

2. Research

We did a quantitative analysis on 53 participants who answered a series of questions pertaining to how they learned best.

Arisa ESCS Pitch Deck (1).png

Research insights we gathered included:

  • Primary learning platform: YouTube

    • Easy to digest​

    • Low commitment

    • Abundance of information

  • Average attention span for videos: 3 minutes​

  • Method people learn best by:

    • "Doing", or hands on learning​

    • Videos

    • Listening

    • Reading

    • Infographics

Suggestions we made:

  • Prioritize ease of digestion

    • Keep on site videos short​

    • Add summaries/highlights

      • Larger and off-set from other content​

      • Use bullet points

    • Make text containers smaller (not spanning a page)​

    • Make sentences 15 words or less

  • Add Interactivity​

    • Option to provide feedback on site​

  • Add option for video inline descriptions​​

    • Once clicked it applies to all videos​

3. Style Guide

Frame 2.png

A style guide was then created based on the website's existing UI. We used this to inform our design proposal later on.

4. Proposal

Arisa ESCS Pitch Deck.png

Our team proposed three different device versions to make the website as accessible as possible.

04.png

​Mobile version:

  • Drop down menus are available at the top of the page

  • Page level selections are also available at the bottom of the page

  • Designs included mockups for the About and different learning levels

  • Website videos should contain inline description* to increase accessibility

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*Incline description is where the video continues playing while the description is verbalized in real time as to not interrupt the flow of the video.

Arisa ESCS Pitch Deck (1).png

The tablet layout is similar to the mobile layout. The displayed information has been carefully thought through and arranged according to our research data, especially points about information being easy to digest and being given an abundance of information through video platforms.

Arisa ESCS Pitch Deck (2).png

The web version alternates videos just like the other two display versions. We made a suggestion to ARISA Lab that videos should have an option for in line description as well as choose two set typefaces for the website.

5. User Journey

ES_CSP User Journey Map.png

Creating a user journey has helped us understand potential pain points and places for opportunities. This narrows down certain decisions and makes the experience easier for our target audience.

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For example:

A pain point for forgetting, being overloaded, or seeing conflicting information has opportunities for stylizing the content to be easily digestible through chunks, colors, and placement on webpage.

Challenges

This project was pretty open ended, giving us infinite possibilities for designing the product.  At the time, the content for the website wasn't available for our team to view so we asked a lot of questions to help us understand the nature of the project. It was also the first time I learned about universal learning design principles.

Accomplishments

Our team worked with a real life client who consulted us for user experience design principles. We made a proposal and do an official pitch.

Take Aways

I was able to learn and design for a younger target audience, another facet in UX design. Research really helped to shape some design decisions since it backed up the proposal. I found that not many people knew about inline description on videos. Learning should be fun and accessible, so being knowledgeable about UX principles that helps to make that come true is really important!

Pitch Deck

This is what my teammates and I showed to the folks at ARISA Lab.

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