Teacher Source

My Role: UX Designer |Duration: 1.5 weeks| Project Status: Ongoing

Project Overview

As remote learning continues indefinitely, teachers from around the globe struggle with the proper tools and practices to provide students with the best education. In our project, we explored possible solutions to help within our mobile-web and desktop designs.

Scope of Work

Teaching elementary students remotely has found to be one of the biggest blocks to providing quality education. With many distractions, technology learning curves, and the lack of experience with teaching remotely, teachers are in need of a way to combat these challenges.

Process

We sent screener surveys out to a network of teachers and narrowed down our user interviews to 6 candidates. After synthesizing our data we created an affinity map to identify key insights from interviews. This also helped us build our persona which allowed us to refine our problem statement and create solutions.

Next, we created a Feature Prioritization Matrix and a MoSCoW Map to select the most essential features to include in our product. Then moved on to a design studio to sketch our ideas out. After, we created our mid-fidelity prototypes and tested them using our target users.

We then brought our mid-fi designs to high-fidelity with new and improved changes. Another round of usability testing was conducted before prepping the Zeplin file for hand-off to the development team.

Problem Space Statement

Due to the rapid transition to remote learning, teachers are overwhelmed by trying to replicate their lesson plans and teaching methods in the virtual environment without training, and frustrated by the trial-and-error approach they have had to take to determine best practices.

As a result, Linda finds it hard to maintain the same level of teaching quality she is able to provide in person.

How might we create a space where educators can share and determine remote learning best practices and frameworks as they are developed?

Concept Proposal

Teacher Source: A closed access, publicly-funded teacher exchange network that allows for uploading/share/exporting lesson plans and curriculum materials, and posting about best practices, methods and resources (blog-style or forum-style), and access to training content for remote learning.

Feature Prioritization and MoSCoW Map

Both these exercises allowed us to identify that content uploading and content discovery were the most essential features, as they are the minimum elements to provide the users with a valuable experience. This includes the content itself, and being able to upload and share user content from their individual accounts.

Features that function similarly to social media, like following other users, up/down voting, etc. can be put on the back burner and incorporated later.

Design Studio

After discussing our respective ideas, the team discussed how to converge the second iteration of designs.

We decided on the key features of the mobile home screen, including a hamburger navigation menu, user utility menu, and search bar.

The main content upon landing would be a welcome message over a hero image, with the key services of the site displayed underneath/upon scrolling.

High Fidelity Designs

After conducting a usability test with a mid-fidelity prototype, we moved on to designing in high fidelity to continue developing the concept. The key learning from the first round of usability testing was that the way we had intended to use the links under the hero image, did not match with user expectations, so we adjusted where those those links led to.

Recommendations + Implementation +Next Steps

In order to ensure our product is fully functional, a desktop usability test will be conducted in see if users have any other recommendations or pain points. We will also build out more pages such as “forums” and “resources” so that users can properly navigate and see all of what the product has to offer. When all of the design iterations have been completed, we will send this off to a developer to get it up and running.

Once the development stages have been finalized, we will start to deploy the service to a small batch of school districts throughout the US to see how educators are incorporating the product in their day to day lives.