Case study on prototyping educational applications using persona-based approach

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, many technologies and applications have been developed to support the digital learning environment for teachers and students either physically in class or virtually at home. The need has increased due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, as students must join online teaching and learning at home either they are at primary, secondary, or tertiary levels. Since the requirements are different according to the level of education, some educational applications are not suitable and complicated for lower education levels. Considering various users' needs, persona-based approach has been used in many studies to elicit users' requirements and derive diverse scenarios from user personas before moving to implementation stage. Thus, this case study proposes a persona-based approach to identify students' goals or needs, pains or challenges besides their satisfaction when using educational application prototypes. It involved eight prototypes for learning Computer Science topics and 29 secondary school students. The findings conclude how the persona-based approach can be used to investigate diverse users' needs, challenges, and scenarios as the inputs to design educational applications with digital contents or e-contents for specific topics or subjects.