IMAGINE LEARNING CLASSROOM

Ongoing Student Work

THE GOAL

Enable teachers to easily assign related curriculum and allow them to provide comments to students for real-time guidance.

Assignments for ELA curriculum require multiple pieces of content to support the main lesson(s) and require students to return to those content items repeatedly throughout a unit. As a teacher, it was unclear what additional assignments needed to be made in order to support a lesson or multiple lessons. Students also needed to have a clearer indicator when teachers assigned new content to them and know when they received a new comment from their teacher.  

Timeline: 5 months

My Role: User Research | UI | UX | Prototypes | Journey maps | Graphic Design | Interaction design | Animation

Tools: Figma, Adobe CC, Lottie, AfterEffects, Angular, VS Code, SASS, Tailwind

UNDERSTANDING PLANNING + COMMUNICATION

Providing a way to ensure the application is reducing friction on repetitive planning tasks. After the planning phase, alerting students to critical communication from their teacher dramatically improves the two-way communication needed in learning.

Teachers in K-12 core education have very limited time available both in and outside of class. They are stretched thin trying to keep up with the necessary grading, assigning, and prepping of materials. Any friction in this process takes away from precious time needed to do all the tasks they have to accomplish each day. Furthermore, students in grades 3-12 studying math and ELA, can often miss critical information such as when new assignments have been made and when comments have been left from their teacher. This is particularly evident in early readers.

EMPATHIZE + DEFINE

I performed a competitive review across several other LMS platforms to determine how other offerings handle similar challenges for their users.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Pros

• Allow teachers to assign curriculum to individual or groups of students

• One-click assignments for curriculum in a consolidated modal

Cons

• Can only assign one assignment at a time and teachers still don’t have a sense of what else they need to assign to support that piece of instructional material

• Despite having solid UX for assigning and how those assignments are distributed, they lack the ability to make informed recommendations to teachers during the assignment process which creates a multi-step assignment process for teachers. 

IDEATION + TESTING (Round One)

By recommending related materials as a teacher is assigning, it removed 10 clicks per additional assignment they needed to include. This saved a lot of time by allowing automatic recommendations and bulk assigning of more than one assignment at a time.

After conducting user interviews with both external and internal stakeholders, coupled with the competitive insights, several solutions emerged and we had a deeper understanding of critical touch points we needed to address for both students and teachers. 

Key insights from customers included the following…

• Reduce repetitive tasks by automatically recommending related curriculum to bulk assign

• Lean on familiar UX patterns with assigning and commenting

• Allow teachers to comment in real-time to help students