Progress Tracker for teachers.
Background
Education.com provides teachers and parents with supplemental learning resources to help children achieve their full potential at school. Premium members at Education.com have access to a progress tracking tool that helps them monitor their children’s Education.com learning program progress, identify problem areas, as well as provide clear next steps to help their children
Current business challenges:
Increase paid members subscription and renewal rates
Motivate users to create accounts for their children on the platform to increase engagement and retention rates
hypothesis
By creating a meaningful and actionable interface for our Premium teachers, we will increase retention rates and number of users creating accounts for their students on Education.com’s learning platform.
My role:
UX/UI Designer
My team:
Senior UX Researcher, 4 Engineers, and a Project Manager
The Impact:
Net Promoter Score moved from 25 to 66
System Usability Scale moved from 75 to 84.
The percentage of Premium Teachers adding students to their accounts increased from 6% to 20%
Progress Tracker before redesign
Process
01 Research & discovery
Understand how users use the product now and their mental model of tracking their kids’ progress. Make sense of the data to produce clear next steps
02 Key questions
What problem are we solving.
03 Success metrics
Identify how we’ll be measuring our success.
04 Iterative designs & Summative research
Making sense of the data to produce clear next steps.
05 Designing the user interface
06 Takeaways and performance
01 Research and Discovery State
As part of the discovery phase of the Progress Tracker we had 1:1 in-depth interviews with 5 Premium teachers and 3 non-Education.com member teachers. All interviewees used competitors’ platforms.
GOALS:
Understand how users use the product now
Understand the mental calculations used to determine academic skill proficiency
Examine the solutions provided by competitors
Determine the flow of pain points for Education.com’s current product and competitors’ products
Determine usage similarities and differences between parents and teachers
Current user flows
Currently teachers need to perform a lot of mental calculations and toggle between different Education.com pages in order to assess overall class problem areas and what resources need to use in order to improve class score proficiency level.
Affinity mapping
Key findings
Keep it simple. Data must be pre-digested and straightforward
Teachers want a quick and easy way to get the overview class information they need (progress by students and by skills).
Teachers are more interested in comparing and grouping kids and skills than parents are (parents just wanted to see their own students’ data)
Teachers need an ability to assign resources en masse to groups of students from the progress tracker. They are less interested in individual student progress unless there is a problem with a specific individual student.
Teachers want recommended games and other activities (not just printable worksheets, as it is being suggested currently)
Group skills into domains (sub-skills)
Progress Tracker metrics not as informative as users need
Ideal User flows
To further synthesize our research we created ideal user flows for our Premium teacher users, identifying 2 potential use cases:
1. End of day class planning - skill review
2. End of day class planning - new skill
02. Key questions
How might we create an informative and appealing report card that reports on children’s academic proficiency and completion
How might we help our Premium teachers to bucket their students into different proficiency-based categories so that they can identify patterns and differentiate their instruction and resources accurately and efficiently
How might we increase the usage of this tool
03. Success metrics
Once the scope was identified, it was time to think about success metrics against which our new design will be measured:
The percentage of users opting-in into the new Progress Tracker
Number of visits to different sections of Progress Tracker
Percentage of users assigning recommended resources en masse
During this phase we wanted to find the answers to the following questions:
Do we have a viable concept?
Does this solve our users’ needs and inefficiencies?
Do our users know what we’re trying to communicate?
04. Iterative designs & Summative research
Sketches
In order to efficiently explore conceptual directions and get quick feedback from project stakeholders, we started with paper, pencil and post-it sketches to get rough ideas out there.
Wireframes
Once our initial ideas were reviewed by internal stakeholders and we identified directions we wanted to proceed further, we converted our hand-drawn sketched into wireframes and tested them with our users
CONCEPT TESTING - ROUND 1
The findings:
8 out of 10 of the test participants found the top portion that showed growth over time and usage of the platform to be unnecessary and confusing as it didn’t provide any useful information
Both views: progress by skills and progress by students (internally we called this view “gradebook view”) were met with excitement and considered to be essential in assessing the bigger picture of the progress of the entire class
For individual student progress view, teachers didn’t find seeing all students on a child selector screen useful. In fact they found it to be overwhelming and would prefer to have a search box that would allow them to quickly search for individual student, or a simple dropdown with students’ names will work as well as a child selector screen.
One of the teachers briefly mentioned that she rarely uses the individual student view on other platforms. This view is helpful during parent-teacher conference period, which normally happens only 2-3 times during a school year
9 out of 10 teachers expected to find an entry point into student details by clicking on the name of a student in the overall student view
What we wanted to know:
If providing teachers with the most current information of what, who, and how much their student accomplished for the past few weeks would help them see the value of using the Education.com platform on a regular basis?
Is it helpful for teachers to see visualized data illustrating growth over time of their class as a whole and of their individual students?
What view (by skill, by students, or student details) was considered the most useful?
What do users expect to find when they click on a name of a student in the view by student (aka gradebook view)?
CONCEPT TESTING - ROUND 2
What we wanted to know:
Do teachers find it useful to have a left-side navigation within the Progress Tracker?
Is there a benefit to seeing all the grades in a class view even though they are teaching one specific grade level?
Is it clear what each color represents?
Is it helpful to see grade completion percentages on a student detail page?
What information was expected to be found on a student detail page inside of the activity log?
The findings:
9 out of 10 teachers found the left navigation to be overwhelming and unnecessary since they were mostly interested in seeing 2 views on a regular basis: view by skills and view by students
3 out of 10 teachers were special needs teachers and expressed a need for seeing all of the grades on their class views since on the average their students can be spread out through 3 or 4 different grade levels even though they are teaching, for example, 2nd grade. 7 out of 10 teachers were teaching regular elementary school classes, but because some students in the same grade can be learning on different grade levels, having access to multiple grades in the same view was equally important to them as well
10 out of 10 had no problem understanding color coding: red - student is not getting concept, yellow - student needs additional work, green - student is proficient in that skill
On a student detail page, teachers expected to find not only all the activities that individual students did for any given skill but also what questions were answered incorrectly. They also were expecting to see time spent on a game and the number of attempts a student took to complete a game in order to assess whether a student was guessing answers or if they truly don’t understand that concept
05 Designing the User Interface
Now that our wireframes were validated, and initial friction points in the user flow were identified and fixed, we were ready to move on to high-fidelity UI designs.
Iterations
There were a lot of design iterations in UI Design. We decided to focus on Class Proficiency and Class Score Chart views separately.
Some general considerations that were taken into account:
There was a concern among main stakeholders that we are creating a lot of navigational layers at the top that can potentially create problems with scalability when we decide to grow our product.
Based on the feedback from both our users and stakeholders we decided to convert tabs at the top to a view switcher between “Class Score Chart” and “Class Proficiency”
We removed “Student Details” from the top and placed it inside of “Class Score Chart View” as this view rarely is used by teachers and 9 out of 10 teachers expected to find an entry point into student details from “Class Score Chart.”
Class Proficiency
FIRST ITERATION
During our first iteration, we decided to focus on exploring different approaches of displaying overall class proficiency skills in a scannable and digestible way.
SECOND ITERATION
Based on feedback from a design critique, we decided to explore a horizontal view of class skill proficiency. During the next iteration, we shifted our focus to exploring various options to find the optimal way for our user to complete the following tasks:
Identify trouble areas
Group students by proficiency
Select students to assign resources
Select resources to assign to students
Assign resources
FINAL DESIGNS
Some rationale behind our decisions:
We wanted to make the task of assigning resources en masse to be very easy and intuitive
We decided to explore further the idea of combining recommended resources and the list of students into one page. We deliberately kept it as a separate page in case we decided to reuse it elsewhere on our site
Skills shown on Class Proficiency should display number of students bucketed into each proficiency level to keep data pre-digested and straightforward
Class Score Chart
FIRST ITERATION
After the concept testing for this view, we felt confident that we found the ultimate solution for this view. Now we needed to come up with a UI that would seamlessly allow our teachers create ad hoc assignments for their individual students.
FINAL DESIGNS
Some rationale behind our decisions:
On the “Class Score Chart” view, teachers liked the idea of hovering over a student’s score to find high-level info about the student’s most current score. Furthermore, they expressed a desire to be able to click on the score and create an ad hoc assignment for that individual student
We decided to keep “Assign resources to individual student” as a separate page in case we needed to reuse it elsewhere on our site
06 Takeaways and Performance
Takeaways
Working in tandem with UX Researcher will produce highly functional, user centric product in a timely manner
Teachers are great interviewees and user testers who can clearly articulate what they want from a product
When it comes to designing a dashboard, provide actionable data whenever it’s possible
Performance
After launching the new version of our Progress Tracker, we started observing our success by performing A/B split tests (A being an old version of the Progress Tacker and B - the new version), creating surveys on our site, as well as monitoring CS reports and child account creation
The percentage of Premium parents adding students to their accounts increased from 6% to 20%.
We were also keeping an eye on NPS and SUS. Since our new version of Progress Tracker was launched, our Net Promoter Score moved from 25 to 66 and System Usability Scale moved from 75 to 84
Testimonials
“Excellent change in Progress Tracker! It is easier to read the data and learn where students are in their learning. Great resource!”
-gg…ck@llschools.net
“I like how you have it divided up into specific goals. This helps me as a Special Education teacher track specific goals and objectives.”
-ge…rd@rcisd.org