THE CHALLENGE
Literator is an app that assists teachers by helping them track their students' reading progress. Their request was for us to create a scheduling feature to help teachers organize their 1:1 meetings with their students.....
APPROACH & KEY INSIGHTS
Business research, user interviews, competitive analysis and a synthesis of research revealed the following insights:
- Teachers value time and efficiency
- Methods differ pending on teacher organizational preferences
- Value must be high to motivate teachers to adopt platform
OUR SOLUTION
Our process resulted in a sorting feature with multiple options as opposed to a scheduling feature.
We also proposed a redesigned landing page to display more actionable information as well as a new set of features inspired by our research findings and user testing that included note taking, a timer, and other organizational aides.
Teammates: Linda Kuang & Niels Thorsen
Deliverables: Visual design prototype, visual specification documents for iOS ready for development.
Duration: 1 week.
Toolkit: Screener surveys, user interviews, competitive analysis, affinity mapping, personas, storyboarding, user flows, ideation, paper prototypes, wireframes, usability testing.
CONTEXT AND CHALLENGE
As public schools across the country adopt Common Core as their standard for student performance tracking, new opportunities arise to help teachers increase efficiency as they implement these programs in workflow.
Our clients' brief challenged us to create a scheduling feature to help teachers plan and schedule their 1:1 conferring sessions with their students.
Project Brief as given from clients through General Assembly.
RESEARCH
Our hypothesis was that teachers with underperforming readers in their classrooms are more likely to find Literator valuable and adopt the platform as long the program accommodates their workflow.
We set out the following learning objectives for our research:
- Classroom Context: Understand the various factors that make up the space that the teacher works in.
- Method of Tracking: Learn how teachers track their students' progress and gain insight into why it works for them.
- Workflow: Ask about their process to find out as much as possible about how they work and move from step to step.
- Challenges: Learn about challenges in their process, including extra attention to how they schedule their 1:1s with their students.
User Interviews
We conducted 8 half hour in depth interviews with teachers ranging diversely in demographics.
Competitive and Comparative Analysis
Analysis of 6 products that either directly or indirectly compete with Literator.
Literature Review
Read articles and websites discussing teaching methods using Fontas and Pinnell system.
SYNTHESIS
After affinity mapping and analyzing our results, our design principles became clear. Potential solutions for our designs grew from this point.
- Save Time: Teachers' daily schedules are incredibly busy and hard to manage, anything that can cut down on time will go a long way.
- Keep Organized: With so many students to keep track of, lesson to plans, meetings to attend, notebooks and grades to sort out -- organization is key.
- Increase Efficiency: Any way to cut out extra input, redundancy in recording information, or streamlining the process in general is highly valuable.
- Focus on Task: Being able to stay focused on accomplishing tasks and not being interrupted is essential to teachers.
- Ease of Learnability: Changing habits is not something teachers do without good cause and technology is often seen as intimidating to teachers.
Our affinity mapping, organized by questions at the top and responses below. The blue colored responses were from teachers that used the Fountas & Pinnell system and responses were grouped together to help identify trends.
IDEATION AND ITERATION
With our research findings and design principles in mind, we began quick sessions of design studio to generate ideas. After evaluating our collective efforts, we consolidated our best ideas in a paper prototype driven by our scenarios.
Focused on 2 scenarios:
1. Going straight to conferring in 1:1s with students and continuing from one student to the next in the teacher's preferred sorting method.
2. Grouping the students first, then sorting by a preferred method before beginning 1:1s, then reviewing session and sending student results to parents/administration.
Iterations based on feedback consensus: We tested our prototype with teachers, providing them with a scenario to work through and watched for patterns in the feedback to inform and guide our subsequent iterations.
Screen examples of our paper prototype. Left is landing page, right is an early version of a sorting option we were developing.
Several rapid sessions building towards consensus through group critique.
We prioritized two main user flows based on our research and personas.
We conducted a total of 12 usability tests using prototypes increasing in fidelity.
USE CASE FLOW
BEFORE AND AFTER SCREENS
PROTOTYPE
With our new sorting feature for Literator, teachers can now choose which way their student list is ordered. This allows them to save time and effort while offering enough options to accommodate individual teaching styles.
We added ways for teachers to see their class progress from the landing page to help with organization without impeding their workflow. To help cut down on effort, we incorporated new simple features including an automatic timer and note taking capabilities to address issues that our research had exposed.