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
Improve the returning user experience by making it easier for educators to pick up where they left off on their enrolled professional learning courses. Prior to the update, users did not see any marker of enrollment or progress on course cards.
PERSONA
This project focuses on the experience of a busy educator that utilizes the professional learning section of Education Exchange to complete their yearly professional development requirements. Because this individual incrementally and sporadically completes at least 5 courses total in a year, they need to know their progress on each course as soon as they land on their dashboard.
RESEARCH, CONCEPTS & USABILITY TESTING
Status lights
A first preliminary round of usability testing surfaced that in the hierarchy of the course cards, after the image and title, users only focus on one other factor.
To help the progression status stand out in the hierarchy, I decided to use an existing status light component already part of Adobe's design system, Spectrum, as it would also be ready for engineering to take over and ship specification-wise.
Six states
Per product and analytics specifications, there were six existing course states to design and test.
Utilizing the principle of progressive disclosure, I decided to include a simple and clean yet informative design showing only the progression status for states 2 through 6.
Findings from usability testing concept 1
Testing with 15 vetted educators revealed that the concept made sense as the status lights "popped" on the course cards.
However, users wanted to see a numerical marker for progression, such as a percentage or progress bar. Users also thought the status lights were too similar in color, although the colors made sense in context.
Concept 2: Adding the time factor back
Per the usability test findings, it was clear that users needed a numerical indicator in addition to the status light to clarify the progression on course cards.
For design concept 2, I restored the time indicator on the course cards and chose to place it underneath the status light. That way -- after the image and title -- hierarchy-wise, the emphasis would still be on the progression feature.
Concept 3: Adding the participant factor back
For consistency's sake, I decided that the final design should keep the time and participant information on all cards.
The status light came in when a progressive indicator was needed in the user experience.
Concept 4: Removing the time factor
Due to belatedly realized constraints on the analytics side, the 3rd design concept with the time indicator would take some time -- approximately a year’s worth -- to get sorted and thus shipped.
This required that we land on this 4th design concept for the short term.
FINAL DESIGN
The 4th design concept I presented to the design and products team was launched in November 2021. Meanwhile, the design I envisioned in my 3rd iteration was launched a little less than a year later, in August 2022.
COLLABORATION WITH PRODUCT & ENGINEERING
Two check-ins a week with product and monthly meetings with engineering allowed us to share learnings and align on use cases, blockers, and requirements.
I also passed on design specs to engineering to ship the finalized designs.
LEARNINGS & IMPACT
Educators are constantly intaking content online
Educators are constantly intaking content online to be better educators and to fulfill professional development requirements. Educators feel encouraged when courses show progression since this marker ignites a desire for completion.
Owing an end-to-end process is very rewarding
Once shipped, my design was able to reach 1 million educators. The countless iterations based on user insights and the time spent ruminating on how to best solve the problem were well worth it. During a presentation I was giving to the PMs, my manager mentioned that I had thoughtfully considered this problem from all angles, exhausting most solutions given the constraints of the project.
Collaboration and trust make a world of a difference
There was consideration from the PM team to forsake the time feature and ship the design as seen in concept 4 for the short and long terms. Having built rapport with the PM team, I felt comfortable speaking up and advocating to keep the time feature. To convince the team I presented insights that focused on the user and that specifically pointed out how the time feature would improve the user experience increasing engagement and thus completion.