BBC Micro:bit Teacher Portal

Interactive Prototype Design

Project Overview

For a university coursework, I was tasked with creating an interactive prototype of a teacher portal for the BBC micro:bit, a "pocket-sized" programmable computer. I had to design and create this prototype with only a list of basic requirements to help guide me. We were not allowed to use Adobe XD to create our prototype due to submission requirements, and so I had to use PowerPoint. The image below gives some context on the micro:bit, and a bit more information on what the prototype is.

The importance behind carrying out this project was understanding how to use design thinking principles to create a user-tailored application and focusing on making something user-specific, as opposed to feature-centric, in nature.

Click here to download this interactive prototype for yourself and try it out.

I am including this as a case study because I learned a lot skills during this coursework that translate well to a corporate environment. In particular, there was a large focus on developing a product that followed essential design principles, such as Nielson's heuristics, and used information from data packs and interviews when deciding on the functional requirements, as opposed to implementing features I thought would be interesting.
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Additionally, I created a user persona to justify and evaluate the value of my features, a technique used by many companies when designing and developing a product. I received a mark of 88% for this prototype.

Below you can see a gif of the welcome page and log in feature. You can choose to either log in, or test the "create your account" feature. I implemented a case of error checking where a non-verified email was used to sign up for the account, preventing access to those who aren't from registered schools within the UK.

Creating account functionality with error catch

Below is a gif of a user accessing the lesson material from their schedule. You can see that the teacher is provided with materials to help them set up the class, such as FAQ's, documents detailing the class and lesson slides. Additionally, they are linked to the forum section of the website where they can converse with other teachers/the author of the class to ask for assistance.

Overall, I found this task project very useful because it gave me an understanding into UX and it forced me to develop an understanding into how humans naturally interact with interfaces. This meant when designing my prototype, I had to make it as easy as possible to intuitively understand how to use, so as to improve the user experience throughout their journey of using the prototype.