Team: Ryan Anderson, co-lead Micah Hinson
Industry: Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Education
Project Length: 3 Months
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Tools Used: Figma/FigJam, Slack, Photoshop
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Background
Nearly %70 of college students admit to being afraid of public speaking and are aware they struggle with it. 90% of them want to improve. However, traditional practice methods fall very short in aiding students with being both prepared for a presentation or speech and gaining public speaking skills and confidence.
I co-lead this project to rethink the way college students can practice speeches and presentations using AR/VR.
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Methods
Persona
The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design
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Student Interviews
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Find Themes
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HMW Statements
Value Proposition-Design:
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VPD Canvas
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Napkin Sketches
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VPD Statements: Ad Libs,
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Competitive analysis: Comparative Canvas
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Defining the Problem
The Design Challenge
How might we boost student confidence and public speaking skills by allowing students to feel like they’re in both their intended setting and presenting to their intended audience?
Traditional practice methods like practicing in front of the mirror, friends, or even recording themselves all seem to fall short in aiding students with being both prepared for a presentation or speech and gaining public speaking skills and confidence. That’s where we come in to help.
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“I would practice more if helpful and available people were around to practice with.”
-Student Interviewee
Understanding Our Users
Target User
College students currently taking public speaking classes
and have low confidence presenting in front people
Student Interview
I conducted an interview with a current college student who just completed a public speaking class and fell under the 70% of students afraid of public speaking and the 90% who want to improve. I came away with three important themes of user pains and gains.
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Confidence Feedback Consistency
Persona
This is Mike.
He is enrolled in a public speaking class at
Northwest University and has an important speech
to give on Monday.
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Mike is terrified of public speaking and hates giving
speeches, but he really wants to get better.
He wants a way to practice his speech that will give
him the ability to have excellent speaking skills, effectively engage his classmates and professor, get an A on this speech, and ultimately pass the class.
He is frustrated because he doesn’t want to be nervous speaking in front of people. He doesn’t see improvement when he practices with his friends, nor do they consistently have time to be his audience. Even worse, Mike finds it impossible to receive specific feedback from his professor.
What Mike needs is: confidence, feedback, and consistency when he’s practicing.
Ideation
“How might we…?” Statements
Using what we learned from expert and peer interviews, and creating our persona Mike, the next step was to reframe those insights as generative questions: “How might we…?” statements pertaining to the user needs of confidence, feedback, and consistency.
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HMW create a practice environment that looks and feels like the real intended speaking environment?
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HMW give the speaker feedback that is content related and helps them improve on current public speaking flaws/skills?
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HMW replicate a real audience to interact in time with the speaker and their specific topic?
Value Proposition Design Canvas
Another ideation technique we used was creating a Value Proposition Design Canvas to clarify our customer understanding, describe how we intend to create value for that customer.
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Prototyping
We wanted to make our ideas more tangible and shareable so we did low-fidelity napkin sketching as well as writing down more of these ideas on sticky notes.
Solution: Real Practice
An AR/VR speech practice application
Initial Value Proposition Statement
Real Practice helps college students who
want to Improve and practice their public
speaking skills by allowing them to practice
for a realistic audience and environment
and give them relevant and direct feedback.
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Competitive Analysis
Competitors like Virtual Speech and Panic Lobster are doing similar things, but I knew there were areas where we can do it better.
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1.) Specific for College Students.
2.) Offer package deals of AR/VR
headsets and our Application.
3.) Have classrooms etc., pre-
uploaded on the application.
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Proposal
Real Practice is an AR/ VR speech simulation application that helps students practice/hone their public speaking skills by creating and displaying a matching environment to that of a realistic classroom setting. As the student practices doing a run through of their presentation, Real Practice will generate virtual audience members who will mimic both human behavior and facial expressions throughout the presentation. We then will provide a synopsis of feedback and constructive criticism at the end. This whole process intends to boost student confidence in public speaking and sharpen presentation skills.
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Value Proposition Statement
For college students without public speaking confidence, we simulate students’ intended audiences and environments, so they feel confident
and prepared to speak publicly so their presentations and content feels second nature.
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Feature Areas
Replicating Environment
One of the main features is replicating the environment in which the user will be speaking in.
Classrooms, auditoriums, chapels, theaters, etc., are all places that our company needs to be able to accurately replicate and simulate for the user to feel comfortable and confident in that space to be prepared for the physical environment when giving their speech/presentation. Real Practice’s database will include premade simulations of each classroom on the campus as well.​
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Producing Feedback
Another main feature is to give relevant and helpful feedback to the user based on their presentation, information, and audience engagement.
This includes having a HUD with a volume meter and a meter measuring general audience engagement. This would also include the feedback report given at the end of the speech/presentation.
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PRD & PRFAQ
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Mid-Fidelity Mockup
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Development Requirements
For replicating a realistic environment, our VR headsets would need room scanning, as well as AR compatibility. The switch from a realistic replication of the environment and the actual environment with a virtual audience using AR is very important. Room scanning is viable to both accurately place virtual audience members as well as replicating the environment for VR use outside of the intended environment.
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For producing feedback, our AR/VR Headset must have the abilities to track both motion and sound for eye contact and vocal projection. Our AI needs to be able to accurately analyze the presenters' spoken words and present a synopsis of accurate feedback based on public speaking research and the actual information they presented that would be beneficial to user improvement.
What We Need
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$1,000,000
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5 Developers
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1 Product Marketing Manager
We would use these for further testing as well as beginning development of the AR/VR application.
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Next Steps & Learnings
What’s Next?
This class project ended with only a single screenshot visual mockup, next steps I would want to take is testing our product. First we would want to create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and offer it for free to a number of college campuses and monitor usage and impact on grade and overall public speaking skills. We would then implement any feedback before continuing with development.
Learnings
What We Did Well
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Bringing individual ideas together through collaboration
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Utilization of Figma/FigJam
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Continuous Iteration
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Interviews/Interview scripts
What We Could Have Done Better
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More napkin sketching
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Dove deeper into prototyping
Future Application
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The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design
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Value Proposition-Design
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The end-to-end UX design process
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Importance of collaboration
So much of what we accomplished came from taking our individual ideas and bringing them together to bring forward new, better ideas. If I did this project alone I would missed out on a lot of good ideas and accountability of keeping the user at the forefront of our design process.
