2024-25 · SDCL Lab · Under André van der Hoek and Yu Lu

Daily Smirk: Scaling for Instructor Needs

Making peer feedback work at scale with an intuitive user experience, from course creation to management.

UX Design & Software Development with Maithy Le & Sean Fong

Context & The Problem

How might we give instructors meaningful control over course and feedback structures while keeping the dashboard simple enough for frequent classroom use?

  • Daily Smirk is a high-frequency peer-assessment tool that allows students to rate and comment on each other during group projects. Instructors are able to view team progress and feedback.

  • The former instructor dashboard lacked a user flow for project and rating creation. Class creation had to be manually inserted into the database.

Timeline

Between April-June 2024, rapid prototyping began for the Daily Smirk's instructor dashboard, course creation, and project creation pages. Implementation for a proof of concept occurred between June 2024 to March 2025.

Design Goals

  • Enable instructors to create courses and projects with minimal friction while supporting scalable assignments and feedback.

  • Enable glance-able insights into student groups, so instructors see more and click less.

Smirk Selection

Between a drop-down and preset buttons, we believed that a drop-down was most beneficial to our scalability needs. Our stakeholders anticipated in the future that more instructor-made templates would also appear in the drop-down overtime.

Information at a Glance

  • Student cards were redesigned to maximize the amount of information shown to instructors.

  • Instructors would be able to identify all groups of students through filters and the bar-graph representation of Smirks, regardless of color.

Between the Design Process

A back and forward with stakeholders and developers revealed the following questions I set out to address.

  • How will we distinguish the "default set" versus an "instructor-made set"?

  • What will this look like to the user and through the database?

  • How will users be guided when creating their own Smirks?

In combination with our User Research, we were guided to the right direction when choosing to implement new features.

Answering those Questions

And so, we made it here.

  • Each section, including Smirk Configuration, contains explanatory text for the users.

  • Users are restricted from modifying the default Smirk Schemas, considering the database overhead— with the ability to create their own from these templates.

  • An "elevator style" for ordering over dragging to modify.

  • A modal that allows customization for smirks through user-upload, name-changing, etc.

Conclusion

The basic version of the Daily Smirk is currently deployed at the University of California, Irvine in the Department of Informatics. Currently used in classes ranging from Software Design to the Senior Capstone class.

Daily Smirk 2.0's development paused in April 2025, but these designs serve as a blueprint for a system intended to scale.