Refining a popularly used teacher training Placement portal

I worked with Tk20(later to be known as Watermark Insights) to create an improved experience of their placement portal. This portal was designed to help universities provide internships to their student teachers(students who are learning to become teachers). It helped them keep a track of their student’s internships and their performances during these internships. This was a very popularly used feature and this project was initiated as a result of continuous user complaints.

Design Process Overview

In order to understand the problems in the current design, I conducted some research and came up with design solutions to improve it’s usability. I used UX processes to identify the current problems and deduce its root causes. Along with the current usability problems, this research also revealed the major short comings of this feature. It highlighted the fact that the current portal was not serving its user to the best of its capacity. The placement process at universities was way more complex and a system could interject and help make a lot of these task much easier for the user. What universities needed was a Field Experience Management System, i.e. a system to help maintain their university contacts, provide information on available internship positions, match students to internships based on their preferences and program requirements and keep track of student performances during these internships.

I worked with my Project owner to present the importance and need for this system to company stakeholders. This was an eye opener for the company executives and they decided to put together a team to build Field Experience Management System. At the end of this project, my project owner and I were proud to have improved the current usability of the portal and provide a direction for the future of this feature.

Timeline

4 Months

Team

1 UX Designer(myself), 1 Project owner, 1 Business Analyst, 3 Developers, 2 QA Testers

Design Process Details

After talking to the users & system experts I identified some of the key issues in the current system. They were as follows:

  1. Users complained about the process being very lengthy & tedious.

  2. Unnecessary steps caused confusion amongst users.

  3. The maintenance cost of the system was very high. This was because the system was very flexible & supported a lot of individual use cases.

  4. As the system was not very intuitive, users had to be trained to use it.

Next, I started my research & discovery process. I used the following UX processes to dig deeper into these problems:

  1. Heuristic Evaluation & Cognitive Walkthrough

  2. User Interviews

  3. Deep dive discussions with field expert

  4. Affinity mapping with stakeholders

The underlying reasons for these problems were:

  1. The current system was trying to serve desperate user needs through the same feature set.

  2. Over the past several years, this system was enhanced with individual user’s requests. This resulted in creation of a Frankenstein system, which did not take the overall user experience into consideration.

  3. No qualitative or quantitate metrics were used to design this system.

Quick Wins

Once I had a list of problems identified, I worked with my Project Owner to prioritize them based on it’s service to the user and the time & efforts needed to implement the solutions. Some of these were:

  1. Establishing distinct processes for new placement creation process & editing existing placements. This made it easier for the user to identify and accomplish these tasks.

Screen+Shot+2019-01-05+at+2.59.07+PM.jpg

2. Some other revisions that made the placement process easy and intuitive were:

  1. Removing unnecessary steps from the process.

  2. Changing terminologies to match user expectations.

  3. Providing guidance to help users understand tasks more effectively.

1. Adding text to indicate an optional step

2. Accommodating user needs by providing appropriate exit points.

3. Changing button labels to clearly identify actions.

3. Changing button labels to clearly identify actions.

4. Providing clear help text to guide user

3. Changing the search feature to make it clear and easy to understand. Accommodating rare use cases under advanced search options.

1. Simplified search to showcase the most common use cases.

2. Adding advance search options for not so common use case.

4. Reducing information in data tables and making it customizable for the user to change as per its requirement.

3. Reducing and reordering data columns to reflect user’s needs

4. Customizable data column to serve different user requirements

4. Changing the workflow to make it less tedious.

Combining steps for a user to select a cooperating teacher and its location in one place

Future of Field Experience

Our research revealed the need for a Field Management System. I conducted affinity mapping to discuss these user needs and create categories for the same. Some of the missing user needs were:

  1. Lack of tracking placements.

  2. Using the district database made the placement process easy but the current system did not utilize this database.

  3. Institutions used student’s request applications for placing them and the current system did not support this self initiated placement process.

  4. Current placement process did not facilitate any communication between institutions.

We also created workflows for these user tasks and used them as artifacts to talk to the company stakeholders & other executives.

End Note

At the end of this process goals achieved were:

  1. Implementing design changes to improve the current usability and elevate user pain points.

  2. Conducting research that helped inform the organization about user’s unmet needs and provide direction to this feature set.