Gradebook

Modeling a user-centered culture through design

Team
Project Manager, Business Analyst, Applications Development Manager, Subject Matter Expert, Research Lead, HCD Leads

Overview

Last Chance to Get It Right

In February 2018, I joined this project for a national tuition-free public charter school to redesign their gradebook module. I was accompanied by my long-time collaborator, Karen VanHouten.

Off the shelf solutions didn’t allow for the kind of variety needed for a company that operates over 80 schools in multiple states and serves almost 60,000 students. So they built the solution that fit their very unique business needs. Unfortunately, the custom solution—robust as it was—suffered from performance issues and usability challenges, and that resulted in very frustrated users.

Our primary objective for this project was to employ human-centered design techniques to design a product that delivers value to teachers and improves trust in the tools provided from the company. Our benevolently subversive objective was to model and teach these techniques to the product managers, business analysts and developers who made up the product team.

We began the project with stakeholder alignment sessions to get the team heading in the same direction.

Challenges

It’s nearly impossible for teachers to see the full picture.
Missing a lot of contextual information that would help support decision making.

The system is too rigid to adapt to so many different educational needs.
The way the system was designed and implemented made it difficult to accommodate a dynamic teaching environment.

It takes too much of teachers’ already limited time.
Inefficient task flows, confusing navigation, and slow loading screens meant hours of work to document student assignments and grades.

Research

Stop thinking about features. Start thinking about needs.

Many teachers kept their own paper gradebook so they could track student progress more easily.

Our primary research technique was contextual inquiry. We went into the schools and listened to teachers talk about their work. We included developers as well as business analysts on the interview teams so the full team built empathy with the teachers all along the way.

Key Insights

One size does not fit all. Teachers have to accommodate a classroom filled with different levels of competency.
The system is in the way. Teachers are working around and outside of the system.
A student’s grade doesn’t tell the whole story. Grades are not necessarily a good indication of the student’s performance.

With these and other findings, we started into ideation around possible solutions. We started with some things we believed would have a high likelihood to result in significant improvements.

Navigation
Fit the system behavior to the mental map of users.

Discoverability
Make pages, workflows, and actions more clearly visible.

Visibility
Give better access to important information & insights.

Workflow Efficiency
Streamline the experience of workflows & interactions.

New Features
Fill in missing elements of the experience.

Content Issues
Improve the language in system content and messaging.

Performance
Squash bugs & make performance improvements to eliminate waiting for data to load.

Design

Iterate to clarify, explore, and learn.

We used presumptive design as a method to elicit conversation and learn which of our assumptions were wrong and why. Early design explorations were not presented as solutions, but rather to expose faulty assumptions, to share and evolve our understanding, and to explore different ways to solve the problems.

All along the way, the team was involved as we iterated and gathered feedback in short cycles to refine the design concepts. Design was not just an output of “the designers,” but a tool for the whole team to clarify, explore, and learn.

We used a variety of methods to model the data, the relationships between attributes of courses, scoring methods, as well as user flows and site navigation. We worked in Miro so the team could collaborate asynchronously and have a shared view of the thinking as we went.

Solution

Deliver value and learn continuously.

With the broad concepts established in the form of design concepts, we focused on a smaller set of features that could be developed and tested with a small number of pilot schools. The team agreed that they would continually enhance the product and add new features based on a demonstrated need from the pilot schools. We identified sponsor users who would be both advocates for the new system and a voice for the users at the school.

Results

A solid start in the right direction.

We delivered a solution that more accurately mapped to the way teachers think about tracking the progress of their students. Beyond the solution, the practices we modeled helped to establish a practice of human-centered design that has continued through multiple product modules since. They have continued to invite us back to work with them on other projects and continue to deliver value to the teachers and administrators of their schools.