Hearing-Inclusive Teaching System (HITS)
Service Concept, Speculative Design + Virtual Reality.
“How Might we prepare teachers to create a more equitable and inclusive learning environment for d/Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) students?”
CLIENT
Seattle Children’s Hospital + University of Washington Human-Centered Design & Engineering
ROLE
UX Researcher / Research Operations, Program Management, Prototyping
TEAM SIZE
4 people
PROJECT TYPE
Client-sponsored Capstone Project, Graduate Program
Speculative Design + Emergent Technology
DURATION
01.01.23 — 07.01.23
Brief.
My role on this project was to research and define the problem space and potential use case for Virtual Reality (VR) within public school settings for training purposes. This included the structuring of the research and design process in order to best uncover user values and needs for potential impactful design solution. I was also responsible for managing the project and communicating with our stakeholders at Seattle Children's Hospital to ensure goals and visions aligned. This project was 26-weeks in duration. The project is speculative in nature as we question how emergent technology, such as Virtual Reality (VR), can be used in arguably non-conventional ways to meet the needs of a community.
Explore the concepts / prototypes. Links below.
Problem.
Over two-thirds of children that are d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing (more than 200,000 in 2017) are mainstreamed in public school education. Despite this, many schoolteachers lack the proper support, resources, and training that would help them instruct these students more confidently and to their full potential. From our foundational research, we found that public school teachers with d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) students rely heavily on guesswork as opposed to formal training. Even when trainings are offered, there are often barriers in the form of limited time, access, relevancy, and are simply unengaging. Additionally, there is little to no formal training on topics such as inclusion of DHH students and meeting their unique needs. On the other end, DHH students may feel misunderstood, embarrassed, experience isolation, and even become fatigued from the extra effort required to understand their teachers and their peers.
Solution.
Our solution is the Hearing-Inclusive Teaching System (HITS), an app-based training service that incorporates the use of VR for immersive hands-on training. By utilizing both a mobile app design and VR as an immersive training tool, teachers are able to put themselves in training scenarios inspired by real stories from DHH students so that they can build empathy and skills to address a variety of situations within classrooms before they happen. HITS meets the needs of teachers by providing a free-flowing learning experience that is at the teacher's preferred pacing. This solution design is speculative in nature and still has many questions and areas to further explore.
RESEARCH + DESIGN PROCESS
01 — RESEARCH
I utilized a wide range of research methods in an attempt to get a holistic understanding of the problem space, our intended users' needs, and feasibility of VR in this particular use case. This included literature reviews, competitive analysis, in-depth interviews (teachers, DHH adults, and SMEs), and co-design storyboarding activity to capture real stories and experiences.
02 — DESIGN
From our research, we began to ideate on how our solution might look like. We wanted to incorporate a mobile app design to pair with the VR experience as a hub. Due to time constraints, we limited our prototyping to narrow set of wireframes for both the mobile app and the VR experience. Our team split into two to tackle this endeavor. I focused on developing the user flow of the VR experience and created usability protocols for myself and the team to execute during usability testing with participants.
03 — VALIDATION
Due to time constraints, we were not able to get a large sample for validation. However, we were lucky enough to convenience sample 4 current and former public-school teachers to test our prototype. Participants showed significant interest and reiterated the need and value for this sort of solution— some even commenting on the potential for scalability (going beyond training on DHH students). This process also brought to our attention low-hanging usability issues.
OUTLOOK
REFLECTION
Adaptability and patience.
There were many compromises our team had to make due to time constraints in order to land on a minimum viable product. Access to our targeted demographics for research was particularly challenging. We reached out to a handful of schools, including deaf schools, but more often than not, we never heard back from them. It became necessary for us to lean into convenience sampling. Luckily, after we found and interviewed our first teacher participant, our recruitment “snowballed” as they recommended other teachers and connections for our project. Another obstacle was when we wanted access to stories directly from DHH children from Seattle Children’s Hospital’s clinic patients. The hospital’s IRB process was complex and required time that the project could not realistically work with. It was important that we collected real stories and to not solely rely on brief anecdotes found online because we did not want to objectify DHH experiences. We wanted our design solution to be authentic by incorporating real stories. We worked around this by creating a storyboarding activity to capture DHH stories and experiences anonymously. This was distributed among the clinic patients parents with instructions on how to participate. This project had many moments of ambiguity, but with a bit of patience and the ability to adapt, it enabled us to make the best out of this project
Embracing ambiguity.
Speaking of ambiguity, our team was entirely new to this problem space and were also novices to VR technology. But we did not let that fact stop us from embracing every idea we could think of, no matter how “wild” or “out there” our ideas may have seemed. At the same time, we had a healthy dose of skepticism in regards to VR. We were always critically asking “why VR?” every step of the way because we wanted to make sure it was the right tool for our particular solution in this very broad and diverse problem space. Overall, our team had a balanced mindset around being open to big ideas and also being cautious about potential design solutions and its implications.
Positive team dynamics.
Our team came together to work in this problem space because we wanted to be challenged, to create impactful solutions, and to ultimately have fun while doing so. Aligning on this purpose became a north star for us. There were many moments where our team had momentum with exciting ideas and a wide range of solutions. And other times where we had to pause and be critical about our ideas. But we made sure to keep our communication as open and honest as possible, in order to keep the project moving forward. We approached this project with a laid-back attitude, which gave us a lot of room for fun. We were able to laugh at silly ideas and wonky prototype bugs which in turn kept our morale high. At the same time, we recognized our individual strengths and leaned into it, but were also not afraid to try new things. We were all able to contribute and take responsibility equally throughout the process. It’s safe to say that our team dynamic was one of the biggest contributions to our success.
What we ideally would’ve done differently.
One thing we wished to have done differently is to simply be able to talk to more educators and other roles within schools. This would’ve given us a bigger picture of how this problem space is being considered and even how it might be perpetuated. We also feel that teachers of deaf schools would have provided invaluable data during our prototyping phase of the VR lessons. It was difficult to find resources on best practices and teaching strategies regarding DHH students. And even though we compiled our own list of resources for best practices, we would have felt more confident in our design solution if we were able to vet these resources with teachers of deaf schools.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Our final deliverables of HITS consist of a simple set of wireframes and two early-stage VR prototypes that was a part of an ideal user flow. Given more time, we would iterate on the VR prototypes and move from CoSpaces to the Unity engine to create a fuller and higher fidelity prototype. This would entail more meaningful interactions and better animations which would add more depth and immersion to the experience. The mobile app would also expand on other features and functionalities, such as the e-learning trainings and the community aspect of HITS.
American Sign Language (ASL) Lessons in Virtual Reality
This idea initially came about when teachers we interviewed expressed interest in learning basic ASL that would help them communicate with their DHH students. Through our interviews, we also learned that not all DHH children know how to sign, and even if they did, they may prefer other forms of communications. The idea felt too limiting in terms of overall impact in this problem space, so we decided to deem it out of scope. Given more time, we would like to explore this idea more in-depth, taking into consideration why this might be needed, and how it might be of value for teachers.
Community Features
During interviews, teachers told us how much they value and leverage their peers for support and guidance when it comes to handling unfamiliar situations, such as integrating a DHH student into their classes. We had initially wanted to incorporate a sense of community within HITs, but this became out of scope as we began focusing on our ideal user flow of key interactions. What we would like to know more in detail is how teachers are currently connecting with one another and what kind of barriers and needs are they coming across while doing so. Do they need a place to chat? Maybe some sort of dedicated forum? Do they need to share teaching strategies? How would VR play into this? Community between teachers is important and should be considered in future exploration of this problem space.
Concept of an ASL learning lesson in VR, using the Oculus’ hand-tracking functionality.