Project: Improved on-boarding and lesson planning

Client: La Salle Education / Complete Maths

Category: Education & Management

Responsibilities:
Workshops, Design strategy, User experience strategy, User research, UX & UI design, Prototyping

The challenge

La Salle Education came to us with an early version of their online platform Complete Maths. They needed some improvements to the way users were being onboarded. Their platform provides support, lesson plans and assessment tracking for mathematic teachers across England.

La Salle Education were receiving positive feedback from schools where the system was up and running, it was clear it was having a positive impact on the teaching and learning of mathematics. However, early feedback from users showed new user onboarding was a key blocker.

They did not find the system intuitive or easy to engage with and quantitative data indicated that some new users were unable to learn how to use the system unaided.

Our approach

We started with a full UX review of the current system to understand all the features and functionality of the platform. With the information we gathered, we started to formulate a set of high level hypotheses. We ran user testing of the existing system on location at a school, we tested with current users and users who had not yet worked with the system.

We started to notice patterns in the behaviour of teachers using the tool, for example some teachers use more of the tools available in Complete Maths than others, with a high number of users just using the platform as a knowledge repository rather than a lesson planning tool.

We also ran a workshop where 20 teachers attended. During this time we carried out an empathy mapping exercise where teachers helped us understand a day in the life of a maths teacher and ran small focus groups to dive deeper into the issues that surround lesson planning, assessments and in lesson resources.

From this we started to highlight the needs, concerns and pain points of each stage of the teacher's journey from awareness of Complete Maths through to becoming advocates. We reviewed these with internal stakeholders and created a set of user stories.

Next we refined our design hypotheses to reflect our latest findings from the user research, this extra information allowed us to not only understand what was happening but also why.

We then redesigned several areas of the tool to ensure the smoothest possible on-boarding experience. We went on to deliver over and above what was requested by redesigning the 'ramping up' experience of existing users who had previously registered but had not used the platform's features to their full potential.

The results

We introduced a new homepage, previously the first screen the user saw was the weekly timetable. We felt there was a clear need to show teachers an overview of their week ahead and provide quick access to high demand resources and notifications.

Teachers are under huge amounts of time pressure, so we ensured key features such as the timetable were quick to glance at and simple to dive in to the detail where needed.

Our designs went through two rounds of user testing, one face to face and one online via Validately.

We discovered that teachers were unclear about the status of their lesson planning, for example they were not sure whether they had already added an objective to a lesson plan. They also wanted to quickly preview a lesson resource to ensure it was the correct one. We improved signposting and made viewing items at a glance easier.

The Complete Maths platform is under constant development by the team at La Salle Education and we are really chuffed to be part of that. Visit Complete Maths to find out more.

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