 I'm going to be presenting on managing design iteration for a uni-wide initiative. My name's Rebecca Richie and I'm a learning designer at Macquarie University. I've been there for five and a half years now. I was feeling pretty nervous when I was putting this presentation together because this, and I'm still feeling nervous now, so I'll probably giggle a bit. This is only my second presentation at Moodle Mood and the last one I did was with a colleague of mine, so first time flying solo. I was doing a bit of research into how to make my presentation not boring because I went to a conference last month in Brisbane and a lot of the presentations were incredibly boring. I probably spent more time on how to make my presentation not boring than actually putting my presentation together. Then I came across these statistics from a survey by Prezi and Harris Poll. They found that most respondents admitted that they were doing something other than paying attention to their co-worker present. The most popular answers were sending a text message, checking email, falling asleep, and I'm probably guilty of doing all of those as well, but in a conference setting, probably throwing, planning what session you're going to next as well. Really, probably only about a third of you are going to be paying any attention to what I'm saying, so that should take the pressure off, but I'm feeling my voice wavering and it hasn't. What I'm going to be talking about is a project that we've had called Kickstart. We've actually got a lot of mileage out of this project. Some of my other colleagues have presented on Kickstart at Moodle Posey and Moodle Moot during Kickstart's evolution. What is Kickstart? In a nutshell, it's about student engagement and a strategy to aid retention. We found that a lot of students would enroll in a unit and not really understand what the unit was about and then drop out before census date. This was an initiative to try to get students to engage with their unit two weeks before the start of a semester. These would generally contain a welcome video from the unit convener and at the unit guide, possibly some student tips, a student tips video, an industry expert video, and maybe an activity or a diagnostic quiz or a sampler of readings. There's always changes with these kinds of things. In 2014 was when Kickstart originated. It started in the faculty of business and economics as a pilot in two undergrad units. You can see from the design it really reflected the faculty's colours. Then the people that started the initiative, they presented on it at Herd Sir Conference and also at Macquarie's Learning and Teaching Week. They received really good feedback and people especially at Learning and Teaching Week, people were quite interested and thought it was a worthwhile initiative. Our provice chancellor's office got involved. They threw some funding towards it and they also decided that they would roll it out across the university, across all of the faculties, and there would be a central coordination through the Learning and Teaching Centre. Moving into session one, which is what we call semesters now, session one, 2015, this is what it looked like. You've got the tile package up the top and then the links to the activities underneath. Moving uni-wide, we changed the colours. It needed to be able to apply to all of the faculties and coincidentally, fortuitously, it fell at a time that Macquarie was rebranding so we were able to do the design with the new branding in mind so that just meant we didn't have to make more changes later on. So we created this template and by session one, 2015, 28 units had this Kickstart package in their unit. But it wasn't long before we started thinking about some of the changes that we could see needed to happen to the design. So we tried to come up with a few different mock-ups and we sought a lot of feedback. So in March, late March, just after the start of semester, we put out a survey to students. So it was timely that it was still fresh in their mind, their experience of the Kickstart package because it's really just about the start of the session, making sure that you're engaged with the unit, it's going to be what you think it's going to be, you're going to be capable of doing it. So we saw student evaluations and it was a voluntary online survey and we also did student focus groups as well. Students shared some really insightful responses that we hadn't even thought about. So that really helped shape the new designs that we were coming up with. So feedback from one of our accessibility specialists at Macquarie and the student focus groups really helped to the initial stages deliver these mock-ups. So the original design with the small icon at the bottom corner, which is down that bottom left-hand side of the screen, we found that that wasn't actually accessible to students because it was all just one flattened image. So that was when we introduced the look of having the colour banner at the bottom with the text, which gave a much better result from the screen reader. The next decision we were looking at was whether we were going to put any text underneath each tile to describe what it was. Feedbacks from the students was that they liked the text underneath and if the text underneath wasn't there, they wouldn't necessarily click on the tile because if they had this across more than one unit then they would assume that even if the image was different that it was going to be the same content across those units. Next we thought about whether they should include the text and the icon as well. What was interesting was that students said that if it was just the icon, they wouldn't necessarily click on it. So we thought, and it's quite interesting, you get so used to your own sort of level of skills and level of thinking, you think that everyone else is sort of thinking the same way you are, but it's quite a revelation when they're not. So we just assumed that if you saw a play icon on something, you would click play, but the students didn't necessarily think that. But when it had the word welcome next to it and the play icon, that was when they would click on it. So the final design is what you see up on the screen now. The response from, so we put this design together and then we gave it to the students and their feedback was that they liked it, they liked the colours, they thought it was bright, cheerful, inviting, interactive, modern and clean looking. They also felt that it was easy to navigate around. So all of those tiles are linked to the activity and the actual links are hidden further down in the unit. So what we found was when the links were underneath, students were a bit confused, they didn't know whether they were separate to these tiles or whether it was the same activity. So hiding it sort of eliminated that guesswork for them. So in something like this, there's always lots of problems that arise, especially when you're managing something across four different faculties. We had lots of stakeholders involved in this. So that was unit conveners, students, lecturers, tutors, the people who started the pilot originally. They didn't necessarily want to run it anymore but they still certainly wanted to have their input into it. The educational designers involved from the faculties and from the central area, marketing wanted to be involved, the provice chancellor's office wanted to be, involved media producers and accessibility. Everyone had their own thoughts on what it should look like and how it should operate. Now the problem we came across in doing the update of the design was that how to implement it, because not everyone is a graphic designer and not everyone knows how to code and that is deliberately bad design and not right code there. Because, again, we make that assumption that because we know how to code or we know how all to us, because design is a key element in our role that everyone else is going to have an enhanced sense of design but they don't. So we found that there were a few issues that sort of popped up like in the old design, the images from the tiles were different dimensions to the new design. So when people were going to apply this new template, the images weren't fitting and they were just squishing them rather than actually resizing and cropping the images. So what resulted was that the tiles were all stretching out of whack. Also, some of the font was changing colours inexplicably and things were suddenly underlining when they shouldn't be. So, bearing that in mind, we had to come up with some solutions that would generally work for everyone. So we created a unit as an information piece and also a guide on some best practice and what are the key things to keep in mind when you're developing a kickstart package for your unit. So we had an example of what it could look like and what we thought was an example of fairly decent design. We also included about the optional components that you could put in. What was the purpose of each one? Why did we think it was important? What did students say? What did they think was important? So the person that created the actual template who did the coding for it, he made up a guide on how to import this into a unit if someone wanted to have a kickstart package and also you could use this to update the old design. We also put in some troubleshooting tips but there were still lots of problems and no, sorry, that's an exaggeration. There wasn't lots of problems. There were the occasional things that came up and it was just a matter of communications to be able to, they were quite easy to fix but it was just a matter of whether people remembered where this particular guide lived. So I think what was really key for something like this is that you need a good communications plan. Your communication should be timely, low resources should be easily located, information easy to understand, a good timeline and clear role expectations. So if I was going to give someone some recommendations to make it work, you really need a central team. We were recently, like many places and people we've spoken to at this conference, we had a restructure recently and now there's actually no one supporting this centrally. So that's had an impact because there's no funding involved anymore, there's no one person to coordinate it and everyone's sort of going off and doing their own thing now and there's the consistency and the brand buildup and the brand awareness for students is sort of tailoring off now. Have good support, clear support, design for accessibility from the start. Get conveners or academics to feel like they own it as well and have a smart approach for the lifespan of what it is you're making. We had people make these fantastic videos with this puppet one here explaining about the unit guide, then the unit assessment schedule changed the next time the unit ran and this video which took a long time to film was quite expensive, was suddenly irrelevant. That's it, thank you very much. The cake start module after semester starts. Sorry, the idea is it's really to support the start and the first two weeks of session. But we still leave it up there. Okay, thanks. Okay, we'll just leave it there, thank you.