Other tools, that were designed to be used during the sessions of the classes and have specific features for these use cases, were compared to analyze in which aspects we can offer a better solution.

The user center design approach was used in this project besides software engineer documentation to produce a complete solution that integrates the user experience design and software development. This approach as is iterative, multiple iterations were performed to improve the solution.

During this phase 10 interviews with students and one focus group with 5 professors were conducted to understand the needs, problems, goals, and frustrations of both types of users and the different technical restrictions that we can have in the software development phase. After them, we came up with four main insights that were addressed in the next phases:

We identified 3 types of users based on the different interviews conducted in the previous phase, the professor and two types of students, the confident students, and the insecure students. So according to this, 3 Personas were designed, each of them with a description, a set of tasks, and the definition of environments.

A set of functional and non-functional requirements were defined to address the different needs of the users with the system limitations that can appear in the development of an app. In addition to this, a set of uses cases were designed to have a clear vision of the different actions and tasks that can be performed in the system.

In this phase, two processes were done at the same time depending on the iteration, on one side, high fidelity porotypes were designed to test them in the following evaluation phase. All these prototypes were designed following the Nielsen heuristics to try to achieve a good level of usability.

Due to some limitations of the project the evaluation performed was not a complete usability test and instead of that, an acceptability test was done in real sessions of classes in the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The level of usability was graded using the System Usability Scale (SUS).

The final application tried to achieve three main objectives, increase the attendance of the students in the class sessions, try to encourage students to motivate them to participate in these sessions, and take advantage of the use of mobile phones in the class sessions. According to this, the next set of features were designed in a multiplatform application.

The application was meant to be used by students and professors, so two types of accounts were defined for the different users, so each of them can have the most suitable version of the app for their specific needs.

The system allows the professors to have different groups for each of the courses that they are teaching so they can manage the different classes properly. The students can join these groups to then be able to assist in the class sessions. This will simplify and automatize the registry of attendance in the sessions.

The professors can start sessions so the students can join these sessions to registry their attendance. To do this process as easy and fast as possible, the app provides a random code of 5 numbers to the professor when he starts the session, this code needs to be shared with the students in the room so they can introduce it in their apps and they can see how their participation is being registered.

For the first type of students (confident students), we designed a participation system that allows them to virtually raise the hand in the app, so this desire of participation is reflected in the app of the professor and he can easily identify the name of the student when this rise the hand in the real world and register the participation. This registration of participation is notified to the students to make them known that the participation that they did was being taken into consideration. With this information, we tried to create this motivation in the student to keep participating in future occasions.

For the second type of student (insecure students) we designed an indirect system to participate, this system is a simplified version of an inbox, so the students can send questions to the professor in the app without the need to physically participate in the session and then the professor can review that questions, answer them and grade them. As we don’t want to overload with work to the professor we give them the decision of how to treat these questions, they can answer each of them or they can simply take into consideration the participation of the students and then answer all of them during the beginning of the next session.