Empower students to drive their own personal learning journeys
Empower students to drive their own personal learning journeys
AltSchool's existing products were getting praise for delivering personalized learning tasks, but many students still lacked understanding of why they were doing certain tasks and how the tasks fit into the bigger picture of where their learning would take them.
My role was to learn more about how AltSchool's products, teachers, and parents could empower students to understand and lead their K-8 learning paths. In addition to this generative research, I also oversaw multiple evaluative UX research projects to identify where their product portfolio could improve to better meet the overall needs of their users. This meant leading two research project teams each consisting of a lead product manager, a senior designer, and multiple engineers.
My work was core to an iterative design process, which translated user research findings into clarified thinking of product strategy and new directions for the overall user experience.
After speaking with experts in various functions at AltSchool and getting buy-in for our research plans, I conducted user interviews with 8 students, 7 educators, and 6 parents. The user interviews consisted of card sorting, cognitive walkthroughs, prototype testing, and participatory design methodologies. I also reviewed previous UX research, internal survey data, relevant education literature, and AltSchool product usage behaviors to augment findings from our user interviews.
Just as it's important to have cross-functional stakeholders (e.g. designers, engineers, product managers, teachers) involved in the user interviews, it's also valuable to begin discussing observations with this cross-functional team as each set of interviews are completed. This allows the team to better ensure key research questions are being addressed and enables the team to start a conversation around what they're observing before this information gets lost as they go back to their other core work tasks. These preliminary discussions also lead to more robust research findings and make translating the research to design a more seamless process. At AltSchool, I used customized Feedback Capture Grids and Affinity Diagrams as tools to help this process.
After our user interviews with educators, our team decided to focus on designing for the user journey of a unit. A unit, or project, centric approach is common at AltSchool and a unit is essentially a tangible segment of a student's learning journey. This allows for a shared focus and common language among AltSchool's students, teachers, parents, and product teams. We synthesized our findings from research with educators to create a ten part framework (pictured below) of what a unit ought to consist of. From there we mapped the user journey for students, teachers, and parents in terms of what their engagement currently was and what it should be as a unit progresses.
Our research found that in order to most effectively engage students we should provide them with clear opportunities to choose which learning tasks they would work on. Choice was a top priority for the students, but in concept testing we also learned that the choices needed to be clear, structured, and anchored to the right moment within the unit lifecycle in order to help students focus.
We also gained valuable insights into how we could increase student understanding of the "why?" behind their school work by showing them where they're at and where they're going in their learning journey, by enabling them to co-develop units, and by striking a proper balance between their needs as students with the needs of their teachers and parents.
AltSchool parents clearly communicated that they wanted more "transparency" into their child's learning. Our research determined that this transparency meant that the parents could see, understand, and take action more so than they would be able to at other schools. However, we also found that there was a latent (less directly expressed) need of trust which counterbalanced the more frequently expressed need of transparency. For example, if a parent really trusted a teacher their need to understand what was going on in the classroom diminished. It also meant that if AltSchool opened up the classroom in any way that might lead to confusion or less trust, this increased transparency would actually be counterproductive.
Before this research AltSchool previously prioritized transparency, but afterwards they began focusing on how to provide transparency in addition (and secondarily) to providing a sense of parental trust. This insight changes the focal point of how AltSchool designs the parent experience.
After our research synthesis was completed, I led cross-functional design workshops with product, design, and engineering to create new product concepts and better address the needs of our users.
One of the main concepts we prototyped and tested was a choose-your-own-adventure unit. In this concept the teachers would create the structure of a unit with guidelines for the students to navigate the unit, making their own choices at key moments for how the unit would progress. Another separate concept, focused on parents, leveraged the successful characteristics of parent-teacher conferences at AltSchool and made that a core part of the parent product experience.
We first tested the existing versions of the Playlists product (student to-do lists pictured below) and the Units product among both students and teachers. This allowed us to better understand what was and wasn't working well before we began the ideation phase. After ideation, we began the next rounds of testing among students and teachers with 3 conceptual prototypes. The vast majority of users preferred one of the new concepts, which provided unit-based grouping of student tasks and unit-centric structuring of teacher planning. In this preferred design we also really sought to make a unit more of fun learning journey driven by a student's curiosity than in previous designs.
Before our research, AltSchool's design focus and product strategy for its parent app sought to maximize transparency of students learning experiences. However, in our first round of testing the existing app, we had found that this increased transparency could often be counterproductive. The app was sharing a lot of information with parents which made it difficult to (1) understand much of the content and (2) to identify the content that was especially important to parents.
We clarified that the goal was no longer as much to maximize parent transparency but rather parent trust. We also identified AltSchool's parent-teacher conferences were the most effective tools for building parent trust. Therefore, with the conceptual prototype we decided to further develop, design elements were inspired by what worked well for parents during the parent-teacher conference, without adding to teachers' workloads.
After six months, the research teams I led at AltSchool were able to test most of the existing core products in the company's platform, clarify what was and and wasn't working, and develop new prototypes for the future product direction of platform. Perhaps more importantly, our research was also able to guide the thinking of the entire company in terms of how it delivers experiences for it's students, teachers, and parents. AltSchool now has a clearer path forward for how it will help create a future of education where students are empowered to lead their own life-long learning journeys.