Boosting Middle School Classroom Engagement with Juno

Juno is both a digital interface and a physical device designed from speaking with real students and teachers to address student disengagement.

Students can submit questions anonymously through Juno’s web interface, while the physical Juno unit in the classroom notifies the teacher in real time and can read questions aloud, preserving student anonymity and encouraging participation.

Role

Research Lead:

  • Wrote the study plans for iterative usability testing sessions.

  • Moderated all research sessions.

  • Created and administered a form design survey amongst middle schoolers.

UI designer:

  • Designed the final mockup of the web interface for the student users.

Team

1 Product Manager
1 Engineer
1 Product Designer

Timeline

2 months

Interfaces

Web
Physical Object

Problem

Objective

Classrooms experience a sharp decline in student engagement during the middle school years. Many students experience academic shame that discourages questions and participation, while teachers lack real-time tools to identify disengagement early.

How might we design a meaningful connection that helps students overcome academic shame while also assisting teachers in addressing disengagement?

How we defined “meaningful connection” going into design to guide us in evaluating our ideas and solutions:

Desired Outcomes

Communication & Understanding

We want to bridge barriers created by language, accent, or other communication differences. 

Building Trust


Encourage trust, either amongst students or between them and their teacher.

Care & Support


Facilitate care, emotionally or socially, between students and teachers.

Ideation

Drawing on prior research from an ideation course and a review of prior art and precedent work, my team and I were challenged to design a custom experience that blended physical and digital components, mediated by interactive electronic elements (i.e. not just screens!). This constraint encouraged us to create a unique, seamless integration of tangible and digital interactions, resulting in an engaging and meaningful experience that enhanced student participation and classroom engagement. 

Listing out the knowns and unknowns of our last two ideas.

The primary goal here was to quickly drive team alignment and accelerate our decision-making process. I facilitated a dot-voting session to efficiently prioritize ideas based on relevance, feasibility, and interactivity. By mapping our assumptions, risks, and opportunities using 2x2 matrices, I then guided the team to evaluate our top concepts and surface critical considerations in a short timeframe. This allowed us to confidently pursue a solution we called "Juno," a system that enables students to pose questions anonymously in class while preserving the instructor's role, as it uniquely addressed our core objectives.

Within the matrix, we broke down our questions and assumptions into opportunities, concepts, and features- prioritizing high-risk quadrants as the most critical to address.

Research Sprint 1

I conducted Wizard of Oz (WOz) experiments with Juno to test:

  • Clarity and value of an idea-Would our users understand our concept? Is it worthwhile in their eyes?

  • Discoverability and learnability of the experience (e.g. do people know what to do?)

For this prototype, I was responsible for the Study Design. To do this, I referenced two artifacts that our team co-created to guide me with the study setup: a Juno storyboard and a diagram of Juno’s system.

An annotated storyboard representing the big picture of our concept/prototype.

 Diagram presenting the set of modules that will need to be implemented to provide the intended experience.

As a result, I produced the session scripts that consisted of a semi-structured interview to dive deeper into our participants’ classroom experiences followed by a WoZ portion.

I moderated both research sessions we ran with our participants: a middle school student and a teacher. During the WoZ portion, I walked both participants through a classroom role-play scenario in which they would interact with Juno to perform their respective task, while another teammate behind the scenes would fake the core experience, and I followed up with open-ended, probing questions.

The student participant was asked to submit a question via our fake interface, in which we would then play his question manually through a speaker hidden in our Juno representation.

The teacher participant was asked to role play teaching a class, and then activate Juno to playback student questions aloud in several different ways.

Findings

Students trust Juno for submitting anonymous questions, helping reduce academic shame.

“I felt like I would have been much more comfortable.” - Student [when asked about Juno playing their questions anonymously]

Recognizing that students trusted Juno to ask questions anonymously highlighted the product’s unique value in reducing academic shame and encouraging participation. This insight validated the concept and gave the team confidence to proceed with further development.

Juno’s current form was perceived as too childish.

Teacher feedback indicated that although the concept was well received, the current aesthetics might not align with the preferences or expectations of middle school students.

For students to actively interact with Juno, it is essential that they find its form relatable and appealing. If the design feels too juvenile or disconnected from their interests, students may be less inclined to engage with it, which can undermine the tool’s effectiveness in fostering participation.

Teachers want flexible, broader ways to interact with Juno.

“Could I ask another student to activate Juno? I don’t want to be in control of it. I want other students to interact with it.” - Teacher


Feedback from teachers indicated a desire for more adaptable input and output methods, suggesting that Juno should not be solely teacher-controlled but also accessible to students to promote inclusive dynamics.

Iteration

The primary focus of this iteration phase was to start to finalize our prototype’s full user experience by ensuring both working functionality and a polished, presentation-ready form. Based on feedback from our first round of testing, my teammates prioritized engineering Juno’s core functionality to focus on the following:

  • Produce a Functioning Question Submission Form: Preserving trust by ensuring anonymity and ease of use is central to the experience.

  • Refining the visual style to better match the classroom culture and make the tool more appealing and relevant for its intended users. We used cardboard for Juno’s prototype shell this round because it gave us a lot of flexibility for changing and expanding parts with ease.  

    • I designed and distributed a short survey to 24 middle schoolers to gather feedback on Juno’s future physical form. Given the limited time and recruitment challenges for in-person interviews, the survey provided valuable insights to help guide the next phase of visual refinements.

  • Designing clear affordances that visually signal when a question has been submitted, ensuring users immediately understand the system’s response and feel confident their input has been received. For example, by adding a small LED indicator to our prototype that lights up to confirm each submission. In parallel, we also explored new interaction models, such as a dedicated activation button, to allow both teachers and students to easily use Juno.

I developed the next prototype testing guide to challenge the new changes we were implementing.

Research Sprint 2

I moderated the last prototyping session with our end-user, another middle schooler.

This interview was split into three parts:

  1. A usability test: Successfully submit a question on our functioning question form.

  2. Feedback on Juno’s current low-fidelity form to help guide the team toward our high-fidelity form.

  3. Follow-up questions on how to improve Juno output interaction.

Student participant testing Juno's form.

Front (left) and back (right) of assembling our low-fidelity Juno prototype for testing.

Findings

Low-fidelity Juno prototype used during testing. The LED pictured here blinks once when a question is submitted.

3D model of our high-fidelity Juno prototype that takes survey results into consideration.

Visual Exploration based on Middle School Design Survey

Out of the 24 survey responses- the top 4 “cool” colors were black, blue, white, and pink.

Middle schoolers appreciate both bold, vibrant designs and clean, simple ones. However, they prefer clean and simple when asked to choose.


Our prototyping student participant responded especially positively to a simple and clean design, noting that it felt less distracting.

Functioning question submission form tested with student participant.

Juno’s Physical Form

Student stated that the prototype looked mobile due to the “arms” looking like wheels.


We observed that the student had difficulty finding and pressing the delicate button to activate question playback. This would also be an issue for the teacher as well.


Overall, the student found Juno’s small size to be unobtrusive. Meanwhile, Juno’s LED, used to confirm a question submission, was a minimal distraction. However, the student missed the light cue because he was still focused on submitting his question through Juno’s web interface.

Web Question Submission Form

“Maybe include a background - it might make it more inviting rather than just a bland screen.” - Student


“You should make the textbox a bit bigger…like let’s say they did this in high school, and we’re asking something about calculus, they would ask longer questions.” - Student


“No Judgement Zone makes sense, but it’s confusing under the submit question button, because it looks like another button. It’s a bit confusing because it looks like you have to click it to go somewhere. It’s right after the send question button.” - Student

Solution

By conducting interviews and designing a targeted survey, I gathered direct feedback from students and a teacher, which we used to refine both Juno’s physical features and guide its overall visual design. This ultimately helped us create an interactive, physical assistant that middle schoolers found approachable and easy to use.

In addition, I delivered a final mockup of Juno’s web UI, incorporating insights from our last prototyping session and survey feedback. The interface features branding that aligns with the physical product, creating a cohesive and unified experience.

Reflection

Edge cases:
A common question we got with our prototype was the misuse of an anonymous submission system.
Going in, the team prioritized psychological safety for students, and we assumed that middle schoolers would want to stay anonymous, period. We were pleasantly surprised that middle schoolers didn’t mind that teachers could still identify them on their end to provide extra help if needed. We are hoping that this stipulation will prevent bad actors from misusing Juno.

Incorporate Mixed Methods Earlier:
Getting access to middle schoolers and their teachers in the classroom was quite difficult with a lot of bureaucracy.
We did manage to speak to both users outside of a classroom, but we needed more input, and ended up administering a short survey later to gather design feedback, which was helpful to supplement our usability testing.

Next Steps

For Student Users:
A restriction of Juno’s technical capabilities at the moment is that we can only play one question at a time, and there is no question queue. There are still a lot of opportunities in which Juno can help students submit questions beyond its current capabilities. For example, handling more complicated interactions like multi-question submission or implementing an option in the future to help the student formulate their questions. From this, I’d personally like to map out possible student flows and develop an IA for the student Web UI. I would also like to create the wireframes for those screens.

For Teacher Users:
As of now, Juno can also only be played by pressing the button. However, we imagine that the teacher might want to have flexibility with the mobility required to play Juno. I would like to explore developing mock-ups for smart watch notifications that enable teachers to control Juno from where they are. It wasn’t something we were able to implement in this project because of time and feasibility, but I would like to explore designing for it.