Caimber Literacy Testing Demo
Caimber's Moby.Read is a self-administered, automatically scored, oral reading fluency (ORF) assessment which measures oral reading fluency in English of students in grades K-5. I worked with the team to improve their demo's usability, and thus impact, for its feature at an educational EXPO.
Roles
Design Strategy
Delivery Strategy
Complete UI
Partial UX
Character Design
Character Animation
Team
CEO
President
Developer
YEAR
2023
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How Moby.Read works
Students read word lists, sentences, and short passages out loud, and they are prompted to retell the passages and respond to short answer questions using their own voice. Caimber uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies to automatically score student assessments.
The EXPO setup
Caimber would be testing their demo using iPads & headphones at an educational EXPO for K - 5 students, who would be accompanied by teachers or parents.
Scoping the project
Only about a month and a half until the educational EXPO, working 10 hours a week, I aligned with the CEO to understand the logistics, then build out a delivery and implementation timeline based on:
• Primary goals
• Engineering bandwidth
• Timeline restrictions
• Addressing ORF and speech capture specific needs
• EXPO demo testing conditions
Design strategy
Prior to joining there was already a basic demo. It was simple and direct, but was lacking in engagement and interactional needs for students. As such, this would need to be improved within the parameters of the OFR software.
A few methods I used to improve engagement:
• Linear, guided flows with minimum physical interaction
• Celebration of task completion
• Progress blocker prevention
• Support with audio guidance
To save time and effort, I came up with systemized flow templates that worked as one size fits all for each grade.
The designs
Visually, I kept things simple and direct(but engaging) to keep the students focused on the testing tasks. I used Micro interactions and well-placed colors to help direct students through the flow.
There were certain variables of the pre-existing demo that weren't changeable due to the nature of the testing methods, like read orientation, word grouping, breaking up paragraphs, etc.
Their previous Moby character was a bit too simple. To make him more engaging, I gave him a slight redesign with assets that gave him personality.
~Home screen
The home screen featured Moby going through a series of animations to catch student's attention.
~Grade selection
Choosing a grade fetches grade specific content for the three tasks.
~Garbled words task
Depending on the grade, a preset list of jumbled words show. This tests a student's pronunciation and comprehension.
~Paragraph reading task
After word reading, students chose a category for the remaining tasks. The next was reading as much of paragraph aloud as possible to test English specific fluency, speed, pronunciation, and comprehension.
Due to the way the testing tools work, there were specific criteria in which text could be laid out. For the paragraph reading, formatting had to follow common book paragraph styles.
~Math word problem task
Next, students are asked to solve an English math problem.
I designed wrong answer template systems for the various problem structures.
~Watch a video
Students ended on a positive note with an educational video.
~Intermediate(connector) screens
To help prepare students for upcoming tasks and to improve flow fluidity, I setup "connector" pages.
All guidance text was voiced over. Although it was my intention to allow kids to be able to replay the voiceovers, it didn't fit into scope.
