Cultivating a Communication Hub
THE PROJECT
Ellevation Education’s mission is to help multilingual learners (MLLs) realize their highest aspirations by supporting activities of districts, teachers, and students. The main activity I was focused on during this project was aiding districts in their Instructional Cycles. These cycles are a series of processes that districts run in order to identify any MLLs, keep track of MLL progress and provide supports as needed, and reclassify MLLs or post-exited MLLs. The platform had two separate, but related, features built independently over 10 years (Meetings and Monitoring), and my goal was to redesign them into one, cohesive feature (Forms) to be more robust and intuitive for the future merging of other features within the product (Reports, Parent Letters, and beyond).
The project aim was to take more of a platform-approach to the feature set so it would be applicable to the various key cycle activities and easier to use, saving time and effort for our busy, understaffed educators. I contributed to this project over two years in a fast-paced, agile environment working alongside senior leadership, product managers, tech leads and engineering managers, engineers, and an instructional content manager.
*Please note these images do not include real company data or logos.
THE PROCESS
Initially working alongside the product manager and tech lead for this feature, we brainstormed requirements, persona roles, user goals, and use cases. We looked at the existing workflows, gathered insights from our customer success colleagues and related feature requests from customer support to better understand the current state and pain points. To gain awareness of the mental model our customers already had related to sending and collecting documents, we did some competitive research to understand and analyze the tools our customers are accustomed to using. I led low-fidelity brainstorming sessions with small groups using FigJam where product managers and customer success managers shared necessary feature requirements and user anecdotes. This helped us to gain a greater understanding on the problems to solve and envision a more centralized path forward.
Workflow explorations
Workflow approach
This was an ambiguous, complex problem to solve because our districts range greatly in size and processes widely vary throughout the different states and regions of the country. There were many ways our districts were used to approaching their instructional cycles, and one of my tasks was to problem solve these differences into a standard, base workflow. I spent some time sketching out different paths. After exploring various options and discussing with senior leadership, we decided to move forward with the approach on the left. It defines certain clear steps, while leaving other steps with optionality and abilities for customization to better meet the diverse needs of our customers.
Once the steps of the workflow were more solidified, I brought iterations of the design to higher fidelity utilizing our in-progress design system as well as the Material UI react component library when components did not yet exist. Throughout this process I further defined various details and helped to set standards across the rest of the product and design system including data tables, empty states, and filtering by considering patterns that already existed within the application, conducting competitive research for deeper industry understanding, and creating new, more robust versions for our product’s purposes.
Because of the nature of this project, there were many pieces of the workflow being defined, designed, and developed at the same time. It was initially tricky to envision the end result and see how all of these pieces would fit together, but I learned to explore numerous variations of the different steps at once to be best prepared for the concurrent turns and pivots.
There was a lot of consideration given to the different user roles involved in these instructional cycle activities. There were many discussions with product on roles and permissioning relating to CRUD actions, and this needed to carry through to the information and actions available in the UI. Admins have many more permissions than teachers, but we wanted to implement a standard base for both user types where certain attributes were turned on or off based on the user’s role.
More complex version for admin user
Simplified version for teacher user
I met with engineering managers, tech leads, and developers throughout this process to discuss the technical feasibility of the in-progress designs, advocating for an elegant user experience and making adjustments as necessary. I led design reviews with the team to review upcoming work as well as answer questions and have discussions when ideas for improvements arose. Also, once we had narrowed down the new cycle workflow, we discussed how the data tables were shaking out and what structure made the most sense - being sure to provide flexibility for future iterations to come.
As I elevated different pieces of the design to higher fidelity, I conducted internal feedback sessions with our product team, customer success, customer support, and education solutions team. I also ran internal dogfooding sessions alongside another product designer on my team. I shared progress on the project in many design studios with the other product designers on the design team for collaboration and feedback.
Throughout the design process I collected user feedback from our external customers as well. These methods included usability testing at conferences (e.g. TABE) and asynchronous feedback requests through to our power users. The feedback from these efforts had a wide range of impact over the two years I was involved in this project and was immensely valuable throughout the iteration process. These led to stronger solutions and improved overall functionality and ease of use.
The Outcome
This design solution enables users to more carefully monitor their active instructional cycles and associated forms, enabling appropriate actions to be identified and taken which aids in more successful, improved completion rates. This work simplified the existing unnecessarily complicated, inconsistent legacy experiences and left the door open for other features to be integrated in the future in support of a more centralized, intuitive communication hub.
Legacy ‘Meetings’ Feature
Redesigned ‘Forms’ Feature
Next Steps
The engineering team continued to implement the epics of work needed to make this newly designed feature become reality. There had been many ongoing discussions and tradeoffs for speed, as this project was redesigning the frontend UI as well as the backend infrastructure. At the time, the product had the two legacy pages and the new in-progress page live in the platform, with plans to sunset the legacy pages soon after. There was also another team working on family engagement who was creating plans to migrate the legacy ‘Parent Letters’ into this ‘Forms’ design. I had consulted with them many times while working on the project, and I’m excited to see how they accomplish this integration.