BACKGROUND INFO
Public speaking is a skill that is essential for personal and professional success, but it can be a challenging experience for many individuals. Glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, is a widespread issue that affects up to 75% of the global population. This fear can affect personal and professional growth, making it essential to find accessible solutions to help individuals overcome it.
The Challenge: How might we create an application to help individuals improve their public speaking skills while making it be an innovative and accessible solution to the problem of glossophobia.
CONTEXT
Project Overview
This project was part of my final project for my Computer Science class, ECS 164: Human Computer Interaction.
In the span of 5 weeks, my team created Podium, a web-based application designed to assist individuals to improve their public speaking skills. We followed a human-centered design process, going through an extensive process of ideation, research, design, user-testing, and development.
Due to the time constraint of this project, we adapted our process and method as needed throughout the quarter. We remained flexible as the project progressed, since the design process is constantly changing and never stays rigid. At the end of our sprint, we presented our final prototype to our class and received feedback from our professor, TA’s, and peers.
My Role
I was the Ideation, Usability Testing, and Hi-Fi Lead on the Podium Team. I contributed to all stages of design, created the usability testing script, and was the main contributor to the teleprompter page and interview/presentation page.
USER RESEARCH
To better understand our target users, people who struggle with public speaking, we began with needfinding through user interviews. We created focused research questions to drive our research, such as how and why people struggle with public speaking. We referenced these to create our interview questions. We asked our users to talk about good and bad public speaking experiences, rate their skills and comfortably, how they prepare for public speaking, and more.
We found that the most common settings for public speaking are for class presentations and interviews. Most people performed best when they practiced well, and worse when not preparing thoroughly. To practice, people usually focus on memorizing key points they want to hit, but occasionally memorizing something word-for-word would be needed. While confidence tends to help relieve the general anxiety and fear during public speaking, extensiveness of practice was ultimately the factor that most heavily impacted performance. Our users expressed a struggle to gain valuable feedback they require to improve when practicing themselves or even with friends.
👤 Persona
With these insights from research, we created two user personas, Jennifer the Expert and Alex the Novice. We continuously referenced these personas throughout the design process to help better empathize with our users and guide the direction of our work.
SYNTHESIS
After synthesizing our research insights and creating ideas for Podium, we established a user flow to guide us through the design process.
Users will first land on the home page with the option to either access prior recordings or record a new practice session. If choosing to record, a user will select one of three modes: Presentation, Interview, and Speech. Accordingly, moving to the teleprompter page, a user can paste text or bullet points and record their session. After completing a recording, users can view their results which outline key metrics (speed, tone, and filler words) and personalized feedback based on the metric outcomes. Finally, they can save or delete the recording and return to the home page.
IDEATION
✍️ Intital Sketches
To turn our ideas from the user flow into a reality, everyone sketched out ideas that tackled the main ideas pages and we came together to discuss them. From there, we chose the features that best addressed insights from our research and usability standards.
MID-FIDELITY PROTOTYPING
📱 Wireframes & Prototypes
Homescreen
The home screen contains two main features: creating a new recording and viewing recent recordings. When creating a new recording, users will choose from three options: interview, speech, and presentation—as those were the main use cases based on our interviews. When viewing recent recordings, users will have access to a search bar, as well as a directory of folders and recordings that have been made in the past. Each recording will show tags to summarize the recording. Once you click begin to create a recording, there will be two different practice screens.
Teleprompter
One will be a teleprompter, mainly used for speeches, and the other will be a user-controlled progression of bullet points or questions. Users will paste their text into the text field and use a taskbar to change items like speed and font size—for added user control.
Results Dashboard
After finishing a recording, there is a feedback dashboard that will show the user their results from the recording. Widgets will contain statistics like time, filler words, speed, and tone—creating a summary that won’t overwhelm a user's cognitive load. Users will be able to save and delete the recording and results.
USABILITY TESTING #1
We went through a round of usability testing after completing our mid-fi designs. We prototyped these frames to create an interactive model that real users can interact with. The purpose of this usability testing was to test out how intuitive individual flows were, get design feedback, and identify pain points that needed to be addressed.
Some key aspects of what we were looking for in our usability testing were testing the teleprompter feature, the interview and presentation features, creating and adding new recordings, and navigating through the results page.
Some positive feedback we received from this testing addressed the simplicity and straightforwardness of the different recording designs, the tone shift design in the recording of the results section, and the navigation of screens from finishing a recording to the results page.
As for areas to improve on, we received feedback on the recording and play feature of the teleprompter, as well as the interview and presentation screens being confusing to use. In addition, the list view feature on the interview and presentation screens were difficult to understand, the reset button’s purpose was unclear, and the placement of the save and delete buttons in the results page created uncertainty in its functionality.
HI-FIDELITY PROTOTYPING
So What Changed?
Homescreen
In the homescreen, users had a difficult time understanding the meanings of our icons and calls to action, like creating a new folder. To streamline this, we added an Edit button that encompassed these actions. Then, we moved the “Add folder” and “Recently deleted” to the sidebar to differentiate between the tasks. Finally, when we asked users to create a new recording in our older design, they automatically clicked the blue begin button before selecting the recording type. So we grayed out the “begin” button, so users must select the type before the begin button turns blue, preventing any error.
Teleprompter
For the teleprompter page, the main change we made was to the media player. Originally, all the different features were all on the same media player. However after our tests, we learned that users had a difficult time differentiating button functions. In our final edit, we refined the media player into two groups respective to their functions. The left for teleprompter functions like changing the scroll size, font size, and playing the teleprompter screen and the right for recording functions like record button, timer, and restart recording button.
Results Dashboard
The final major change we made was to the results page. Our testers all said that the save/delete buttons' purpose was confusing because of their placement in separate widgets. To prevent assumptions about the buttons, we decided to group them together. We moved the save/delete buttons inside of the larger widget to allow users to understand that the save/delete buttons will save everything.
DESIGN SYSTEM
Next, we created a design system to maintain consistency across our team’s designs before diving into high-fidelity wireframes. These design systems are essential in maintaining consistency throughout our product, which in turn creates a cohesive brand identity and a seamless user experience across the whole platform. Additionally, we developed a series of components to ensure consistency throughout the design. Finally, we implemented the design system to create our high fidelity wireframes, creating a more finalized looking product.
Final Design
Podium
With Podium, users have a streamlined hub of public speaking practice.
Homescreen
Users have the option to either access prior recordings or record a new practice session giving users the space to document their progress with public speaking. If choosing to record, a user will select one of three modes: Presentation, Interview, and Speech.
Teleprompter
On this page, a user can paste text or bullet points and record their session. They also have the option to personalize this page to their personal preferences (font size and speed of the teleprompter).
Results
For feedback, speed of speech, tone, and use of filler words tend to be the most common mistakes in public speaking and cause of grade markdowns in a school setting. With Podium, users will have an objective standpoint providing real data on their performance.
✨ TAKEAWAYS
Many features, advancements, and possibilities were not explored or implemented to Podium due to the 5-week time frame of the project. The design decisions made reflected this time constraint to remain realistic for development. Ideally, in the future we will be able to further commit to Podium and establish it as the product we envisioned it to be.
There are improvements to be made to features within Podium. The presentation mode currently only allows text input. However, being able to upload a PDF file or slide deck would better simulate a presentation setting. Similarly, all practice modes should offer the ability to upload documents as it is anticipated that many users would draft scripts externally. We also considered a quick start mode, where users would be able to record a practice session without needing to upload any text. After a practice session, it would be useful to provide more unique feedback. The current metrics like speed, tone, and filler words meet the expectations of our research group; but to go above and beyond, users may also find it helpful to receive edits and suggestions to their speech content and feedback on the volume.
Conceptually, Podium users may require the tool for a variety of settings, some of which we created modes for. One not included was a group project. In the case that users need to practice with a team, each member would inconveniently require their own laptop or they would have to take breaks between speaking to start new sessions. Otherwise, the end feedback would not be representative of what each group member could improve on. It would be interesting to explore a group feature where the recording and feedback could be divided respectively to each student.
Prototype
Click below to view the prototype if you would like to experience the prototype yourself!
@Jessica Chu 2024
made with love 
and lots of sunsets 