Problem
Our first release focused on getting a product out the door with basic functionality such as a content library as well as a read-only attendance tracker and grade-book widget. We tried to create visualizations that showed how classes and students were doing over time, but found bugs when we imported actual data because it was all so vastly different. We needed to figure out a way to deliver valuable insights, create a navigation that scaled, and last but not least, we really needed to ensure that our product was accessible to everyone.

Solution
While our developers worked on the various bugs and analytic improvements, our visual designer, Chase Kettl and developer, Chengqi Zhu established a new, accessible style guide which helped me to create our Sketch symbols, master file, and high fidelity wires at a faster rate. I used this time to build a site map and a case for updating our navigation so that in the future we could add pages for other concepts such as a unit builder.

Deliverables

• Navigation update

• Created a master file and the symbols for each component

• Created an Invision demo of the entire product to empower our offering management and sales team at client visits and conferences

Next Steps
We needed something to make our offering transformative in the education market and few competitors were utilizing years of student data to pinpoint gaps in knowledge levels. Most offerings showed what was happening with students right now instead of considering prior gaps and how they influence student learning today. Unfortunately, we were no closer to this goal than our competitors, but identified that was where we needed to focus some of our efforts.

Problem
In our first attempt at communicating student mastery, I reimagined a design we inherited from IBM Research, turning it into something that I hoped was more understandable and usable to all teachers. I concluded that we needed to show teachers student knowledge levels in the context of the curriculum hierarchy that they are familiar with (Domain > Strand > Cluster > Standard > Sub-Standard) in real time, as the year progresses. From there, we collected feedback where we heard that now that teachers could see what was going on with their students, they wanted to also know "Why?". "Why does the student have low mastery on that standard and what can I do about it?" 

Solution
I dove deeper into learning about student knowledge levels by reading literature, visiting schools and sorting through student data. I learned how teachers track each student’s progress and how they keep track of their entire class (or multiple classes in the case of High School teachers) then used that to move backwards and potentially spot the root cause of a student’s learning gap. I then shared this with our data team and they created a way to do this using analytics. More details about the approach for student and class mastery are outlined below.

Contributions

• Competitor Analysis

• Information Architecture

• Research of Student Knowledge Levels, Curriculum, Testing Practices, Learning Progressions, Scaffolding

• Was a key influencer and lead UX designer responsible for the overall strategy for student and class mastery

• Wrote help text so that teachers understood how each widget could help them

• Led brainstorming / wire-framing sessions and facilitated workshops