improving the
USER EXPERIENCE
of collaborate teaching platform
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a web collaborative and organization platform to encourage teachers to cross-collaborate by sharing resources
Site Link: coteacher.com
app.coteacher.com
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Tools: Figma, InVision
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Individual Project:
Sunny Yu (UX/UI Designer, UX Researcher)
Dami Osoba (Project Manager)
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Problem Statement
Teachers are busy workers. Organizing teaching schedules and course units may get very messy.
Teachers have busy schedules and lots of course documents, making it hard to keep organized.
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How can we provide teachers a space to organize unit documents and share it with their school community? also providing teachers a collaborative option with other teachers?
Goal:
design an additional planning feature to Coteacher platform
encouraging teacher collaboration
Users and Context:
User persona
Using one out of the 8 ideated personas, we decided to target our users to be young, tech-savvy teachers.The teacher may be inexperienced with teaching and can look up to other well-established teachers around the United States to see how they for collaboration, tips and advice to improve their teaching skills.
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Design Process
Research
Planning Feature Competitors: Google Calendars, Monday.com, Session Lab
Having previous experience in the education industry, our manager, our manager Daniel provided the project with his expertise and necessary insight. We used his knowledge and ideas as a jumping off point into further user research.
The initial research phase consisted of:
• Direct and Indirect Competitor Analysis
• Elementary School Teacher Interviews
• Middle/High School Teacher Interviews
• Coach and Administration Interviews
• Brainstorming and Overarching Themes
• Persona Development
Idea Generation
To generate ideas, the team started brainstorming together. We divided the steps into main categories: User Needs, and key considerations.
Wireframing
Early hand-drawn wireframes explored the layout and design of the page. The information is listed out as important features to add to each page
Screens for the planning page, showcasing main features on each screen.
Desktop Wireframes
The desktop wireframes show progress of different iterations of the Planning Calendar feature
User Testing
Pre-testing
Initial run through of software tests done by co-workers helped find any bugs and errors in platform before showing to actual end users.
In person and online interviews
In person and online testing with instructors and teachers provided feedback to improve our platform as well as pointing out errors.
Findings
After interviewing and testing with 18 educators.
13 video calls, 5 in person interviews later
Getting feedback from teachers, instructors provided us with important insight on where users have difficulty which aided us to make changes to have a better usability
" I enjoyed the idea of having a calendar feature in my organization tools."
-Ohio Teacher Educator
" Is there a discussion forum (messaging option) to contact other teachers?"
-New York STEM Teacher
Some of the feedback received from our end users.
Final Wireframes
High Fidelity Prototypes brought me as close as I could get to the real life product before starting the development phase.
The Planning page shows the planning calendar of the teacher. Calendars are which are made up of units. Each unit is given a subject , standard and a duration which determines how it is displayed on the teacher's planning calendar.
Use Cases
Information Architecture
shows the general layout of the Planning Feature. Also shows the potential paths the user can take
Use Case 1: Creating a new Unit
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This Use Case is when an user logs into use the Calendar for the first time and adds their first unit.
Creating a unit
Sharing a unit
Use Case 2: Toggle Between Views
This use case is when a user tries to switch their calendar view from annual to monthly view.
Use Case 3: Sharing Units with other Members
This use case shows when a member shares their calendar
with other members for teachers to collaborate and view their units
Video Demo
The product is currently under development. The video shows how the Planning Feature is incorporated into the Coteacher application.
Conclusion (what I learned)
The effectiveness of Coteacher as a solution is dependent on how well users can interact with the platform.
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Coteacher's usability factor impacted the design of new features. After usability testing, further simplifications of features were done to simplify the log in experience to ensure a smooth, error- free log-in experience for users.
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One challenge was designing additional features in the application to fit into the Coteacher
I learned that user flow diagrams as a research tool was effective identifying screens and workflows that can be easily missed in the wireframing process.
Next Steps
Further usability testing
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Further revisions to simplify user experiences
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Developer hand-off revisions
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Further user testing is needed with users to see their interactions with the features
Revisions based on feedback from user testing can be made to simplify the user experience
Developers may want to simplify some features for the ease of development