ABOUT
Education Exchange is a community of 850,000 educators worldwide, housing free teaching resources and professional learning courses for educators at all levels, enabling them to bring creativity into their classrooms.
PURPOSE
Clarify the value of the Profile and Dashboard surfaces. Do these two surfaces need to be combined or should they be kept as separate entities?
RESEARCH
This chart highlights 3 of the main competing e-learning platforms
Competitive Analysis
In any online experience, platforms usually have a dashboard where users can visit their saved or viewed items.
Across the 7 platforms I surveyed, no one standard naming convention was utilized for these respective dashboards. Thus, it seemed totally on par with industry standards to keep the name of Education Exchange’s dashboard as My Education Exchange.
Insight 1: My Education Exchange Dashboard
The competitive analysis surfaced that educators are constantly intaking content online to be better educators and to fulfill professional development requirements.
Insight 2: Profile and Community
The competitive analysis also surfaced that educators will use aspects of one user’s profile to find relevant resources: both materials & people.
Recommendation
This task flow provides a peek at how a user may begin to engage with Education Exchange and eventually engage in the platform's community long-term
Keeping My Profile and My Education Exchange as separate surfaces is beneficial to building a robust community feature long-term.
The dashboard as its own surface will also allow users to easily access the content they are consuming and pick up where they left off.
Next steps
In keeping the dashboard as a separate entity the next step was to give the surface a UI update to match the rebranding and updated design of the overall site launching in September 2021.
IDEATION: LOW AND MID-FIDELITY DESIGNS
Moving on from the research piece, I utilized the MosCow method as a prioritization framework to determine the key features the dashboard should include as I began to sketch and design in low fidelity.
The first low-fidelity design I created ended up looking pretty close to the final design that was eventually launched on Education Exchange as the updated dashboard.
HIGH-FIDELITY DESIGNS
I also created some mid-fidelity designs but quickly moved to design in high fidelity. Above, four of the numerous designs I conceptualized and tested can be seen.
USABILITY TESTING
During usability testing for this design, participants shared that the dashboard presented the right amount of information. They especially appreciated the time progression marker and the order in which the courses were organized, with the courses closest to completion up top.
Ultimately this design proved too technically variable for the engineering team to implement. The ability to denote time length on courses was also a blocker, as it would take analytics about a year to get this feature to show up on course cards and on the dashboard.
LAUNCHED DESIGN
The new dashboard design was launched in September 2022. The updated dashboard reflects my research, recommendations, and final design iteration I shared with the team.