Literator is an EdTech mobile application that helps make it easier for teachers to track and develop their students' literacy skills.
Currently, the existing app does not have the functionality at the pre-Kindergarten level.
In additon to the new functionality, the Literator team also wanted help with reimagining the existing app.
As the design lead, I led a team of five designers through the design process from tackling the users' root problems through whiteboarding until final validation of our end prototype.
The Literator team had already conducted extensive field research to consolidate user painpoints, so we first sat down with them to understand those paintpoints as well as Literator's user demographic.
Teachers have painpoints around :
Teachers had multiple unique problems that we were to address, so we tackled each via whiteboard challenges. I split the team up in order to obtain two unique solutions for each of the problems. When we converged, we had the option of choosing between the solutions or merging them.
A white board challenge is a framework used to quickly and open-endedly attack a specific problem and produce a solution within a short time-box (usually under 40 minutes).
The results of our whiteboard challenge were some rough taskflows documenting our proposed solution to the problems. The taskflows would act as a guide to aid our UI ideation.
Please see below for an example of one of our solution flows. In this flow, the teacher uses a messaging system that creates a template based off of the student's recent performance in order to incentivize parental invovlement:
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Other concept features resulting from our ideation:
Utilizing a design studio format, we rapidly explored UI designs for the ideas developed from the whiteboard challenges.
In a series of diverging to ideate and converging to critique, we refined our ideas until we were comfortable with a single direction to move forward with.
Leveraging the UI sketches from the design studio, we created a digital prototype and performed initial validation with 3 pre-school teachers. We discovered that the main usability issues were with navigating the app.
We came up with solutions to the usability issues identified:
We implemented the hypothesized solutions into a v2 prototype and tested 5 additional users. Users' behavioral response to the scenarios were rated either a 0, 1, or 2 depending on whether it was a failure, indirect success, or direct success.
The ratings were averaged across users as a metric to indicate usability of the feature:
Users had some issues with 3 of the scenarios. We conjectured hypotheses for why these scenarios were difficult and proposed solutions for remediation as necessary:
Difficult Scenario A – Comparing student to her peers
Difficult Scenario B – Updating Assessment Date
Difficult Scenario C – Editing Student Groups
Check out the v2 prototype we tested with below.
Imagine you're a preschool teacher and try out some of these scenarios:
The next steps would be to continue to test the app with more teachers and to reiterate based on findings and feedback. As the scope of the project primarily focused on the flow, given more time, I would focus more on giving the visual design a bump.
Although the app is far from perfect, the redesign exceeded the expectations of the client and we are proud of the new design and features that we were able to conceptualize and mock-up to help guide the client's further development of their app.