In Context for Educators is a new Gale product specifically designed for K-12 educators, which meets their needs in finding, curating and using curriculum standard based materials.
UX Intern @ Gale, Cengage Learning
June 2018 - Aug. 2018
Mentor: Thomas Piggott (Senior UX Designer)
Tools: Axure, Sketch
While preparing teaching materials and classes, K-12 educators have several needs, and the three major needs are:
Currently there is no product which fully covers all these needs, so the preparing process requires a lot of manual effort. As one of the biggest content provider in the US, it's an opportunity for Gale, Cengage Learning to provide an ecosystem with rich content where educators can prepare all their curriculum standards aligned materials.
After analyzing research results, we categorized and listed all user needs and created 12 personae for major needs. In order to prioritize user needs, in the meanwhile, define the scope of product and make sure it is sell-able and technical feasible, we conducted a persona mapping session with VP, PM, tech lead, sales, marketing, and specialists.
For each selected persona, we analyzed the user scenarios based on different "variables". Using our primary persona, Henry, as an example, to achieve the same goal - finding replacement materials, there are three major scenarios.
After persona mapping, I created a roles and goals matrix with hierarchic goals and the 6 selected personae. The weight of each goal was different according to the importance of each persona. Overlapping goals and special goals for some personae are obvious in the matrix. Prioritized goals of our product are:
Based on the scenarios and important goals we got, my mentor and I together designed several variations and converged into two major concepts. I'll focus on the concept I was responsible for.
1. Set active curriculum standard to filter out matching materials
2. Upload curriculum document to bunch search
3. Show material and standard alignment with tags
1. Manage materials with user created collections
2. Manage collections and collaborators
Since our clients are libraries, we usually will not release a new product and design changes during semesters to avoid our clients' training costs. For this project, educators are busy at the end of summer preparing for the new semester, and considering the planned in-person testing sessions after the beginning of the new semester, I'm not able to follow up with the user testing.
If I have more time...
Participate in user testings to iterate the design and converge concepts into one final design.
Curriculum standards and materials alignment is a great technical challenge for our product, which also leads to possible design decisions to compensate the inaccuracy of algorithm.
If I have more time...
Design a user assessment system for users to evaluate the accuracy of the alignment and the assessment in the meanwhile can be used to improve the algorithm.
We spent almost two months analyzing research results, creating our personae and scoping the new product. And involved multiple stakeholders in several important meetings to get everyone on the same page, decide the overall project time-line, technical feasibility, and so on. I also learned to synthesize and make use of rich data to support design decisions and build a complex system which serves for users with different roles and use cases from scratch.
Research Analysis, Personae Creation, Workflow Analysis, Workflow and Sketch