The following is a case study in an educational product I worked on a while back. I was the UX lead on this project, and managed all the research, design and usability testing, but I'd like to focus specifically on the information architecture here more than anything else.
Information architecture
The project:
When I joined this company, their instructional planning service was just a giant PDF full of tables that took minutes to generate, then had to be printed out, and finally—we learned through user testing—cut into strips and often taped on the walls so instructors could plan their lessons. And this happened every week!
Of course, there's nothing wrong with paper, if that's your jam, but there's no reason to force teachers to have their own little arts & crafts session just to plan their schedules. Surely we could come up with a more efficient method for them.
Of course, there will always be a reason to print these lesson plans, so I did design a printer-friendly version as well. With the press of a button, the colorful, responsive design goes black and white, and trims down all the lesson goals to only those with children currently at those levels. No use printing 20 pages of lessons when you're only going to use 6, right?
The company's student norms calculator used to be an XLS file that instructors had to download, open in Office (meaning Chromebooks and mobile devices were out of luck), and follow a whole page of instructions just to get the file to output a single number needed to help find each student's status.
Can you imagine having to download, edit, and re-upload an Excel file every time you want to see how your students are doing?
The new design runs in any browser, and only asks for a couple simple inputs for the same result. This also allows for faster calculation and better privacy, as an instructor or parent can add and remove individual calculators to only show what's relevant to an individual student, instead of the old design, where everyone in the classroom was shown on the screen at the same time. Not great during parent-teacher conferences.
Creating more intuitive navigation, simpler findability and actionable information for a lesson planning tool
A more dynamic solution in every way
After a few iterations, I came up with a design that lets instructors, parents and students track their progress and find lesson descriptions online. Not only did this make navigation and sharing faster, but loading all the lessons at once meant no more waiting when changing between classes or modifying filters.
Similarly, a classroom-specific feature provided instructors with every student's current standing and appropriate lesson ranges for each one—but this was also done in a static layout that didn't meet the users' needs (and violated all sorts of privacy standards). The new design offers better navigation and contextual options for crafting lesson plans within the same product.
Web-based scoring calculator
