Cleready

Overview

Background: It’s often difficult to understand a large amount of reading at once. In reading-intensive graduate courses, students may have to skim through a large amount of text in very little time, which may not facilitate meaningful learning.
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‍Problem statements:

How might we improve the experience of reading text and increase the likelihood of meaningful learning?
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Key features:

Cleready reduces reading fatigue and enhances comprehension by chunking and automatically summarizing research papers into smaller, digestible components.

Solution

Personal Dashboard
Managing reading tasks, featuring navigation for readings, eBooks, summaries, community access, and personalized content recommendations.

Library Catalog
Showcasing all readings and their progress, with detailed views that include an outline, FAQs, reviews, and announcements for quick recaps and community support.

Segmented Reading
Organized content into segmented sentences for quick viewing; users can expand each sentence to reveal the original text and highlight key sections for easy reference.

Note Taking
A personalized summary section with color-coded highlights and annotations, allowing users to manage and categorize their notes for easy reference and quick review.

Research

Research goal

In our user research phase, we proposed the following research questions:

What are the key challenges and pain points that students face during the reading process?
What tools and strategies do students use to facilitate meaningful learning when they read?
What suggestions do students have for improving the reading process?

To address these questions, we utilized interviews and surveys as our research methods. This data helped us focus on learners who are overwhelmed with work and managing multiple priorities, allowing us to identify their key challenges and needs.

Quantitative Approach - Survey

We collected 14 survey responses from graduate students in LTXD, IDM, G4L, and TC Columbia programs, focusing on four areas: Demographics, Current Course Experiences, General Strategies, and Challenges and Suggestions.

Our users are mainly students managing large amounts of reading. They come from diverse backgrounds, including differences in language, neurodiversity, and life circumstances like work or family. This helps us understand which learner characteristics are most important for our design.

Survey results

36% of survey respondents said that they spend more than 5 hours per week on assigned reading materials in one of their classes. (n=5)

72% said that they had difficulty focusing or a feeling   that the reading is too long. (n=10)

64% said that their readings had too many difficult   or “jargony” words. (n=9)

57% said that they had difficulty grasping the main idea of the reading. (n=8)

Qualitative approach - Interview

We conducted 7 interviews with NYU graduate students in the LTXD and IDM programs to gather insights into their learning experiences. Our aim was to understand how students handle extensive reading and to identify potential improvements they would like to implement in that process.

Interview protocol

Interviewee Background
Identity, interests, academic experience, etc..

Reading-Intensive Course Experience
Feelings towards & challenges with readings in a recent course

Recent Paper-Reading Experience
Walkthrough of a recent reading experience, challenges, strategies, etc.

General Questions about the Reading Process
Typical reading activities, organization, motivation and focus

Affinity mapping

After conducting the user interview, we gathered all of our data from interview transcripts and grouped them based on common theme through affinity diagram.

Insights

Limited Learning Format: Reading-only format is insufficient for effective learning.
Disorientation: Users struggle to identify key information and may feel disoriented.
Memory Retention: Excessive reading hampers memory retention.
No Communication: No opportunities for users to share thoughts or communicate with others.
Progress Tracking: Absence of tools to track progress and reading pace.

Synthesis

Persona

Based on the insights gained from from affinity mappings, we summarize it into 3 types of scenarios and create personas based on these two types of scenarios.

User Journey map

We then created a journey map outlining the steps a user would take to navigate the process of reading research papers.

Key challenges

We chose to focus our three design priorities specifically on the planning and learning phases.

Too Much Jargon
Readings used too many technical, context-specific, “tier 3” vocabulary words.

Takes Too Much Time and Energy
Interviewees felt overwhelmed and fatigued by the amount of readings.

Hard to Understand
Readings were difficult to make sense of due to a lack of context and the lack of a narrative structure to follow.

Difficult to Focus
Interviewees found it hard to stay focused and engaged when sitting down to read for a long period of time.

Key wants

Discussion With Peers
Our users indicated that the opportunity for discussion helped clarify their understanding.

Increase in Multimedia Use
Many users voiced the desire for more auditory and visual media.

Simplification of Language
Multiple users wanted the readings to be less “jargony” and more accessible.

Identification of Important Info
They also wanted a way to quickly identify or analyze key concepts in the readings.

Brainstorming

With these challenges and wants identified, we used the following question to guide our design process: how might we improve the experience of reading text and increase the likelihood of meaningful learning occuring? Our design process brainstorming consisted of two activities: Six Thinking Hats and Crazy Eights.

From these activities, we identified four top design ideas:

Stretch Text, which would allow the user to “expand” or “collapse” the text to set the level of detail and complexity of the text.
Highlight and annotate important passages and key words.
Incorporate text-to-video and other multimedia.
Discussion forum, where users can crowdsource summaries and discuss readings.

We ultimately decided to iterate on the Stretch Text and Highlighting ideas because rather than adding content and complexity (as would be the case for the multimedia and discussion forum ideas), they focus on simplifying the existing text.

Mid-fidelity development

From this brainstorming, we made our first prototype, which had three components:

A home page where the user could access an overview of their readings
A reading page that contained the text of the paper, chunked into sections and highlighted
An outline page that provided a summarized outline of the paper

Design rationale

Cognitive Load Theory
People have a limited capacity for processing information in working memory at any given time.

Segmented Principle
(Mayer, 2001)
People learn better when a complex continuous lesson is broken into separate segments.

Chunking
(Miller, 1956)
People could store more information if they are able to chunk or combine some pieces of information.

The user can interact with the paper in two ways: through the “chunked” text of the original paper, and through the paper outline. It is based on cognitive load theory, which suggests that humans have a limited capacity for processing information at any time (Sweller, 2011). Specifically, Mayer’s (2005) segmenting principle indicates that people learn better when complex content is divided into smaller segments. Additionally, Miller's 1956 experiment shows that chunking information can help improve retention (Rosenbloom et al., 1987).

Reading Dashboard & Tracking

The reading dashboard allows users to upload their papers and features a library section that displays all upcoming reading tasks, tracks progress, and provides access to reading materials and outlines.

Expandable Chunked Summaries

I designed a collapsible section that shows content in a summarized format. Users can click to expand and view the original text, highlight, and add annotations, making it easier to engage with the material and personalize their learning experience.

Outline

To facilitate quick content review, I designed an outline section where users can easily check the material in a summarized format, presented as concise bullet points.

Usability testing

We conducted usability testing with four participants, using scenario setting, cognitive walkthrough, and think-aloud methods, followed by debrief interviews to gather insights.
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Scenario: You are a graduate student that is enrolled in two reading intensive classes that require you to complete the assigned readings and participate in in-class discussions. Claready is a tool that helps you gain more clarity while reading your assigned texts and be ready for in-class discussions.
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After collecting all the data from our first round of user testing, we went back to the drawing board. We updated and added the following to our second prototype:

Takeaways:

‍Our initial main page was not clear enough for our users once they began using our tool.
Users found the chunking feature helpful and time-saving.
Users mentioned they loved the outline page for the readings as it was much easier to digest, so we decided to make sure the overview page was easy to navigate to.
Users expressed a need for support and the ability to ask questions.
Users expressed a need for a note-taking feature and a centralized space to manage all their notes for future review.
Users find locating papers and resources time-consuming, so they expressed a desire for recommendations of relevant materials.

Suggestions:

Include a dashboard that clearly displays reading tasks, provides easy access to reading outlines and notes, and offers relevant resource recommendations.
Develop an integrated note-taking feature alongside the reading interface, allowing users to easily jot down notes while reading. Link these notes directly to highlighted text, creating a centralized space where users can manage and review all their notes in context.
Introduce a recommendation and eBook section to offer users relevant materials
Add a community section to the dashboard and include a FAQs section to provide users with a space for support and to ask questions.

Final iteration

Personal dashboard

To help users manage their reading tasks, I designed a personal dashboard with account management features. The right navigation bar provides access to readings, eBooks, summaries, and the community. There's also a section for personalized content recommendations to support their research.

Library catalog

The reading section features a library catalog that displays all readings and their progress. Clicking on a reading opens a detailed view with tabs for the outline, FAQs, reviews, and announcements, helping users quickly recap and get support from others.

Segmented reading

The reading content is organized into segmented sentences, which users can easily view at a glance. By clicking on each sentence, users can expand the box to reveal the original text, facilitating detailed reading and enabling them to highlight key sections for further reference.

Note-taking

The Summary section features personalized note-taking with color-coded highlights and annotations for easy reference. Users can manage and categorize all their summaries in the dashboard for quick review.

Personalized recommendation

The eBook section offers research resources in a wider format for in-depth exploration. Recommendations are personalized based on past readings and search history.

Reflection

Further iteration

We would like to test with more users and spend more time iterating our designs.We still need to validate whether or not the design is meeting the user need of reducing fatigue and facilitating learning while reading.

Validation and Evaluation

It's essential to validate whether our design effectively reduces fatigue and supports learning. The theoretical foundation provides a solid framework, but real-world testing is crucial to confirm the tool’s impact on students' reading experiences.