Article By: Vicky Chan
In my iDigBio internship, I focused on user experience(UX) research for evaluating the Digital Data conference’s virtual mentorship program. There was a need where the virtual mentorship program has not been evaluated yet; doing so will allow for improvement of the mentorship program and related outreach. This experience was helpful to me as someone interested in natural history science communication and exploring different methodologies of learning experience design.
UX research can be beneficial when considering the evaluation of design choices in any project in any stage. By understanding user or participant choices, there can be insights and evidence for what can improve the ‘product’. This was my first time getting to conduct a UX research project. To evaluate the virtual mentorship program, we wanted to set up surveys and interviews to understand what mentors and mentees thought about the experience. Through this 12 week internship, I researched UX research processes, did a literature review, created hypotheses and survey/interview questions.
From the literature review related to virtual mentorship programs, there were best practices for virtual mentoring and how the SEEDS program fostered micro-communities to support their mentees. These findings informed our choices throughout the study and additions to the mentorship program, like having check-in times on Kumospace. When creating hypotheses and survey questions, it was a helpful learning experience for me. I got valuable feedback from Molly and Adania throughout the process of wording questions to specifically ask what you are looking for and structuring a survey better. After the Digital Data conference, we were able to send out our evaluation surveys and I was able to analyze preliminary data. I even got to do one user interview. The preliminary results from the survey show that mentors and mentees overall had a positive experience in the program, with suggestions for minor tweaks to account for the virtual aspect of this program.
I was able to see connections between my Intro to Qualitative Research class and Learning experience design in general when working through this internship. In our Qualitative research class, we learned about the foundational skills of examining a qualitative experience, which UX research relates to. We learned about conducting semi-structured interviews and coding responses and measuring the validity of the data. I can also see this related to learning experience design, a process we have been learning throughout our LDT master’s project. For our LDT project, we wanted to understand our target learner’s needs better and evaluate what they thought about our prototype. We were able to create surveys and interviews, and think about how to measure learning through different constructs.
I appreciate this chance to apply what I’ve learned in class to a practical context. Conducting user experience research on the virtual mentorship program led to insights that I think will be beneficial for the program going forward. These skills I learned will also inform my work in learning experience design and science communication.
