The Goal
The plan was to select individuals from various teams, combine them, and quickly build a new system so that we could sunset the legacy system. We needed a scalable system to deliver custom and templated course designs for a variety of educational disciplines.
This would be my first project using the Agile methodology. Initially, working in Agile felt like being strapped to the front of a speeding train, asked to lay down tracks that would avoid all obstacles and get the passengers to their destination safely. Fortunately, I do not feel this way anymore.
The original LearningStudio UI in frame sets with usability problems that were hard to fix with modern techniques.
The Challenge
We were given a tight deadline, starting in August with a limited release by year-end. To meet this, we agreed on an aggressive one-week sprint timeline. To make things more intense, we used mathematics, our corporate jewel, as our first course. Many stakeholders, overseeing various aspects of our mathematics division, attended our 2-week check-ins in the first half of development. 18 stakeholders in total.
I needed to balance the business requirement of software customization for administrators to customize the system design and to open or close parts of the system, while maintaining course-level customization for instructors to personalize their courses. Fortunately, I’d met with several instructors at various universities who were using our current software and learned their pain points and feature and enhancement requests.
The initial concept was based on customer feedback but was hard for the stakeholders to accept as the right fix.
The Process
I presented my initial concept at our first 2-week check-in, which aimed to address the most common pain point: instructors had to create a student account and switch between their instructor and student accounts to see how changes affected the student. My design aimed to create a system that looked identical between instructors and students, except for inline editing controls visible only to instructors.
Initial feedback was negative, finding the design too foreign from the current online education software and therefore too complex for instructors. However, among the 18 stakeholders, I found a few encouraging questions about the design. After the call, I reached out to them individually to answer their questions and get more input. This was a pivotal step in my design career.
The inclusion of other departments in the design process is crucial. It helps me understand business issues and involves other departments in balancing requirements with user needs. These individuals became supportive voices in check-ins with the larger group, shaping designs and convincing others of the benefits to our users.
Using feedback from the initial round I put together a fast mock using Balsamiq to show how we could ease the learning curve using modal windows instead of inline editing.
Research To The Rescue
My company hosted an event in San Diego for large institution customers in October. I attended with supportive stakeholders to conduct guerrilla research at the hotel. We met with instructors, asked if they’d like to see our work, and recorded our sessions. We demonstrated a clickable prototype of the new software. The feedback was unanimously positive, every single instructor we shared the prototype were thrilled with the new design. With this research, everyone felt confident we were moving in the right direction.
The Result
The talented development team built and launched the software at the start of the year. Initially, the plan was to test out 40 titles from our mathematics department over the course of the next 6 months. But the positive response led to other departments and disciplines wanting their courses included in the new design. By the end of the first quarter, over 400 titles had been converted.
One of our courses in a custom design for the Psychology department.
