UX Research & Design Journey: Building Lexam, a Linear CBT Web Application for My Bachelor’s Thesis (WIP)

6 min readSep 12, 2022

Be prepared czz this is gonna be a long read! 😆 (disclaimer: pardon my messy writing).

The Beginning 🌱

On my last semester of undergrad, I was required to write a research thesis in order to be able to get my degree. As a computer science student who doesn’t really like coding, I knew I wanted to write and do research in Human-Computer Interaction field. But in January 2022, when we were already asked to write a research proposal, I still didn’t even have any topic idea yet in my head. But one day, a friend in my cohort approached me. Since we’re allowed to do our research thesis in teams, that friend, Jonathan asked me to join his team, with another friend, Ryo. Their team were looking for a UX Designer to a topic they got from our research advisor, Pak Adin. So, there were 3 of us, me as the UX Researcher and Designer, and Jo & Ryo as full-stack developers. Together, we were going to build Lexam, a linear computer-based test application.

The Background 🤔

We’ve been hearing things such as CBT (Computer-Based Test) a lot, especially since its usage rate rose during the Covid-19 pandemic where educational activities are forced to be held virtually. But if I can explain about what’s CBT actually is, I’d say that CBT or E-Assessment is a method of evaluation in educational field that’s being held through electronic devices. CBT or E-Assessment consists of 2 key components, assessment engine (tools that are needed to carry out the evaluation process, typically used by the students/test-takers), and item bank, the collection of problem sets or instructions that’ll be served by assessment engine to the test-takers (Appiah & Tonder, 2018), used by teachers or lecturers to create set of problems.

Well, we got this topic from our research advisor. The background of his idea was because he’s been using this CBT app called TCExam. This TCExam app provides a decent exam system, using linear method. What’s a linear method? Well, according to Appiah & Tonder (2018), linear method is a method that can be applied in an exam where the test takers can only solve problem linearly. They cannot go back and forth, so like they have to answer problem number 1 first before being able to move to problem number 2, and if they’re already opening problem number 2, they cannot go back to problem number 1 and change their answer. It sounds cruel to students, but it looks pretty effective to prevent cheating in a non-directly supervised online exams. But too bad, we heard a lot of complaints about TCExam having a bad UX and confusing user flow. So, we’re doing this study with the purpose of building Lexam, a TCExam-inspired CBT app with a revamp in the UX & tech-stack aspects.

The Process 🐾

The whole design process was carried out using User-Centered Design process. Below is the general diagram of the HCI design process (pardon me because I will be using diagrams in Bahasa Indonesia. Feel free to contact me if you have any question or need any explanation in English hehe).

This research was relying on a qualitative research method by conducting interviews with the relevant users. The users that we’re interviewing were ones from the role Lecturer and Student. We were interviewing 3 users from each role who has ever been using TCExam in a real-life scenario. Here, I’m going to try to explain our process in a simple but effective way. If you want to read the full-text version of the research report, you can download it here: Perpustakaan Fakultas Ilmu Komputer (ui.ac.id), the copy is available in Bahasa Indonesia. So, in this article I’m going to pick only some key chunks of our masterpiece to be explained and displayed.

Qualitative Research: Interview Findings & Heuristic Evaluation

The research we were doing was a combination of Generative and Evaluative research. It was generative because we were trying to build an understanding of users’ pain points and behavior of using CBT app in general. It is also evaluative because we were also trying to evaluate the existing solution, which was our benchmark app, TCExam, as well as evaluating our proposed solution, which is Lexam.

For that, we did qualitative research by interviewing 6 relevant users who have ever used TCExam, 3 from each role: 3 Student Users (aged 21–22) and 3 (Junior) Lecturer Users (aged 28–31). We conducted the interview virtually through Zoom, where we divided the interview in few parts:

Area of Exploration 1: The Usage of CBT Apps. This area aims to gain insights from user about their experience and habits in using CBT apps in general. The sample questions in this area of exploration including “How often do you use any CBT apps?”, “How do you usually access CBT apps?”, “Can you tell me any of your positive and/or negative experience in using CBT apps?”, and “What’s the challenge you typically face in using CBT apps?”.
Area of Exploration 2: Identifying User’s Needs in Using CBT Apps. This area aims to identify users’ behaviors in using CBT app and find any touchpoints in those behaviors that we later may help design solutions to ease/help them in using our CBT app. This area includes questions like “What do you usually do before, during, and after participating in a test?” (for students), “What do you usually do before, during, and after planning/creating a question bank for a test?”, “What information do you usually need in order to be able to create a question to be added into a question bank?” (for lecturers), etc.
Area of Exploration 3: The usage of TCExam. This area explores specifically how users use our benchmark application, TCExam. The questions in this area are including “What do you like and dislike about TCEXam?” and “Can you tell me your positive and/or negative experience in using TCExam?”.
Area of Exploration 4: TCExam Usability Testing. In this area, we were diving deeper into the users’ behavior and opinions in using TCExam more specifically. In this session, we were asking the users to do a specific task in the TCExam app, such as, supposed that you want to edit a question that’s already saved inside the question bank. What would you do? After that, we asked the users about the positive and negative experiences while doing that specific task and asked if they have any suggestion for that specific feature’s improvement.

The features of TCExam being tested to the users are:

for students/test-takers: Exam Details, Exam Page, and Exam Results.
for lecturers: Group/Classroom Management, User Management, Module Management, Question Bank, and Test Management.

Our benchmark app (TCExam)’s student/test-takers view (source: tcexam.org)

At the end of the interview session, we then asked each user to fill a System Usability Scale (SUS) form for TCExam which score later would be compared to our CBT app’s (Lexam) score to indicate if we made any improvements.

The following is the summary of the findings we synthesized from the interview results for student users: