Intelligo.
Providing educational content so teachers can teach.
The Dilemma.
The traditional classroom is valuable and irreplaceable, but it needs a makeover. Teachers all over the world spend too much time preparing for classes. But Instruction is not the same as teaching. Not enough time is allocated to collaborative and personalized learning. Additionally, most schools do not offer recent and relevant subject matter due to a lack of teaching resources.
About.
Intelligo creates high quality instructional content in STEAM and career development fields of study that also meet educational standards. The platform consists of complete libraries of course materials - from homework to activities and projects - with grading support and actionable learning analytics. Intelligo delivers K-12 course material through a live-classroom integration platform, giving teachers time to focus on creating meaningful experiences in the classroom. The team is dedicated to creating a library of complete course materials in fields of study that best prepare students for the modern world.
How does it work?
The Intelligo curriculum offers 10 units of lessons that fit the academic calendar year, with the flexibility to progress at your own pace, and customize your classroom. The high-quality instruction is delivered by experienced teachers and field experts and is designed for the collaborative in-person classroom. We create video lectures, activities, projects, and assessments. A repository of additional resources for each lesson offers support to teachers bringing the materials to life in the classroom. Our completeness of content and support differentiates Intelligo from the supplementary materials space.
The solution.
A content management teacher-facing dashboard that allows the user (teacher) to assign lessons, view student progress, upload content, view common core and state standard alignments, and more.
My Role.
Secondary research, Style guide, UI visual design concept, Hi fidelity wire framing.
The Process.
Understanding the issue, analyzing the research
Mapping the most basic pathways to achieve the desired goal
Sketching out ideas after researching similar existing solutions
Deciding which idea is the simplest and most interesting
Prototyping the most necessary elements of the product
Testing the prototype with users and ideating on the initial prototype
Developing hi fidelity wireframes
Project Length.
Four weeks
Design Tools.
Figma - Miro - InDesign
Communication tools.
Slack - Basecamp - Zoom
Weeks 1 & 2.
This project was limited to a timeframe of four weeks. Our team developed a plan to prioritize the main goals and scope of the client’s needs. While the project should have ended with another round of usability tests, we had to modify and prioritize the tasks as time passed very quickly. To begin we gathered information from the client who provided our team with an outline of needs and tasked us with choosing which of those needs we were interested in helping them solve, within a 4 week period. We discovered that there had not been any initial UX research done, and considered this while developing our project plan. We concluded that the most important aspect of the project is the organization of user content; without it, there would be no product. We decided to design for the desktop predicting that it would be the best device for a teacher. As a team we discussed our strengths and interests as designers and divided up the workload.
Deliverables
Designing a teacher-facing analytics ‘dashboard’ that provides a way to measure progress and see assignments.
Content editing interface - designing a solution for the instance teachers want to create or edit course material.
Designing some of the assets that would be used in the UI.
The client asked that the designs be completed in Figma (where Intelligo had been previously working) for easy visual prototyping.
Our team spent the first week researching existing industry platforms that are similar to the Intelligo concept. We analyzed four competitors and synthesized our findings. Next we developed a user flow, this was necessary to map out and visualize an end to end solution for the user experience.
Interviews.
During week two we completed 4 video call interviews with various teachers located throughout the United States. This was paramount to learning about potential users and the frustrations they face.
Details.
3 out of the 4 interviewees were fairly new to teaching; less than 5 years experience, 1 teacher was in her 10th year.
All participants were female.
Participants taught a range of subject matter; English, career technology education, general education and French; between PreK -12 levels.
Results.
How teachers develop their curriculum
Which Ed tech websites they use to teach or build their curriculum
How teachers decide what to teach, when presented with a new curriculum
How teachers learn new curriculum material
Persona.
After synthesizing information from the interviews, we were able to develop a user persona. This allowed us to gain a general understanding of who might be a potential user for the Intelligo platform, and consolidate that information into a visual guide.
Week 3
Style Guide.
Because of the limited time on this project, I started building a style guide during the first week to be sure all elements and colors would be consistent when it came time to build the hi fidelity wireframes. I took inspiration from the colors and screens that were already built by Intelligo, but tweaked the colors to give them more contrast, and added a soft, rich black to make the platform more elegant looking.
Sketching .
Home.
Sketching helped us visualize what the most utilized screens might look like. The first sketch provides the user a place to login or sign up for the service and provides the most pertinent information about Intelligo.
Sign up.
This leads to capturing information about the user and determines who they are and how they will be using the system.
Dashboard.
Next the user is presented with their dashboard, where they can view all of their content, manage classes and materials, assign classes to different classrooms and more.
Managing content.
Research determined that the user should be able to view all content for each unit of classes and easily determine whether the class material has been completed. Additionally, the user should be able to view all assignments required for completion by each student, and be able to manually mark them as completed.
Monitoring progress.
It was also important that the user be able to view detailed information about each student, their progress in the course, or where they may need more practice.
Assigning lessons.
Our team also captured a possible solution for the task of assigning classes, with an option to ‘assign now’ or ‘assign later’.
Confirmation.
Although some screens didn’t make it to our final wire frames, such as how assignments might be viewed by the students, we did manage to migrate almost all of screens to the dashboard as you can see in the hi fidelity screens. This screen was meant to indicate that an activity had been assigned to a class.
Prototyping.
Next a crude yet effective prototype was made:
To see if the user could get through the setup stage successfully
Determine which features the users notice about the dashboard
(Starting from the dashboard), determine if users can look at all units and assign a task for later.
Usability test and results.
Next we completed two remote usability tests using Zoom, which helped to determine whether the main features of the platform were relevant, cohesive and intuitive. The participants included one high school mathematics teacher and one adult who works in an adult learning and development role. During the test, they shared their screen and spoke freely while the interviewer asked them to do a series of tasks. The tasks involved signing up for Intelligo, navigating course content and scheduling out material for students to complete at a later time. We wanted to determine if those tasks could be completed easily and intuitively. We analyzed the resulting information and found a number of issues:
Issues.
One.
Users didn’t understand the “Copy link to import students” on the 2nd screen. One participant asked “where would I paste it?”
Two.
There was nowhere for teachers to add their own material.
Three.
Users did not know where to look for student data.
Four.
The user was not sure what the calendar function at top was for or represented (screen 4)
Solutions.
One.
Move the link internally (make accessible from inside the dashboard) or, devise a new method for students to enter the class.
Two.
Include a simple method for teachers to add their own class material.
Three.
Make a clear navigation link that indicates student data can be accessed easily.
Four.
Use icons that have a clear purpose, and place them next to explanatory text.
Week 4 - Hi fi wireframes.
Taking inspiration from other ed tech sites, and the basic wireframes that Intelligo had created, I started building out the main structure of the dashboard. I wanted to show how the main dashboard would look to the user (teacher) and all the features that could be accessed from there. Although these look great, they would need to withstand more user testing and would certainly require more iteration.
Registration.
I designed a simple 3 step registration process that begins by determining whether you are a teacher or student.
Dashboard.
This is where the magic happens. The user can view all of their content and complete any number of tasks.
Lesson Prep.
By clicking on the red tab, a drawer opens up where the teacher can load the content for assigning to students, or play the content live.
Settings.
Hovering over the user's profile icon will reveal a menu with all of the settings. Additionally, clicking the red arrows on each slide reveals more features.
Reflections.
While working on a team has its challenges, I found it rewarding. Not only did the workload get split up, but I was able to reflect on which aspects of UX UI design with which I felt most compatible with. Everyone had something of value to add to the project and any disagreements or misunderstandings were alleviated through communication. Although we discovered that some projected goals had to be eliminated due to time constraints, our team effectively accomplished the majority of our project goals and subsequently were able to deliver a viable solution to our client, Intelligo.
I felt confident in my role as the main UI designer and believe that the solution I devised is simple and intuitive. But the only way to prove this is more testing. Thanks for reading!