Seesaw
Adding a feature to an existing product
Background
Seesaw is a learning platform that brings educators, students, and families together to deepen student learning. Teachers design and facilitate powerful learning experiences, students create, collaborate, and make their learning visible, and families actively support and celebrate student learning.
Problem Statement:
Teachers have a lot to keep track of in the Seesaw platform; managing multiple classes, students at different learning levels, meetings, messages from parents, announcements, posting activities, and giving feedback on assignments, but they don't have a way to quickly plan their day & stay organized.
Solution:
Create a dashboard that gives teachers a centralized location where they can manage all their daily tasks, and provides an overview of their day, so they have all the relevant information they need in one place.
Project Details
Role
UX Researcher & Designer, UI Designer
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Miro, Zoom
01: Research
In order to understand how teachers use learning management platforms, I conducted secondary research, including market research & competitive analysis as well as user research, including user interviews with contextual inquiry.
Design Objectives
Design a teacher dashboard for Seesaw
Improve navigation & the overall experience on the platform
Design within Seesaw’s existing visual design system
Research Goals
Understand the competition in the educational technology industry
Understand how teachers organize curriculum content, both within and outside learning management systems
Discover what teachers like & dislike about their current remote learning platform
Market Research + Industry Trends
I started by researching Educational Technology (EdTech) to better understand the trends in the industry.
Educational technology solutions have played a huge role in facilitating distance learning throughout the pandemic
Education technologies that were simple to use, easy to learn & inexpensive were already seeing market growth pre-pandemic, and the pandemic accelerated these trends.
Educators are still at the center of the learning experience and teachers are seeing edtech as a way to develop efficient learning practices and save time in the classroom, with solutions like automated grading, classroom management tools, and paperless classrooms.
Enhancing student engagement is a primary focus for educators, and EdTech companies that have responded to these concerns by encouraging active learning and developing critical readiness skills have experienced growth.
Competitive Analysis
Once I understood the landscape of the industry, I identified 5 competitors, focusing on learning management platforms that primarily support K-12 teachers & students since Seesaw is an elementary ed platform.
I discovered that many other learning management platforms included a Dashboard feature where teachers are able to see valuable data about their classes, assignments and students at a glance.
Using these insights, I determined that on Seesaw
There is no central location that shows teachers everything they have for the day
It takes users directly into one of the classes they’re teaching
If users teach more than one class they have to switch back & forth between each class
User Research Insights
The next step was to talk to potential users to understand their pains & goals in order to empathize with them. I conducted 6 user interviews with contextual inquiry to gain insights into how they use virtual learning platforms, what features they use most, and what they like & dislike about the platform.
All participants used a different learning platform depending on what subject / grade they taught, and what their school systems requirements were
All participants prefer to use a virtual learning platform on desktop
Common pain points: inability to send messages directly to students & parents, compatibility with grading systems
Most frequently used features: homepage, calendar, dashboard, reminders, coursework, class schedule, course syllabus
Most common tasks performed: posting announcements, uploading assignments, checking tasks, tracking progress of students coursework
Persona
I created the persona Jacqueline based on the busiest type of teacher who would use the teacher dashboard feature the most.
02: Define
After completing my research, I moved on to defining the problems with Seesaw’s current website. I created an actionable problem statement in order to sum up Jacqueline’s needs, and came up with some How Might We questions to reframe the design challenges and explore new ideas and solutions.
Point of View Statement:
As a busy elementary school art teacher, Jacqueline needs a way to keep track of her schedule and view her to-do list at a glance because she wants to be able to quickly plan her day and stay organized.
How Might We Questions:
How might we make it easier for teachers to find relevant information more quickly on the Seesaw platform?
How might we simplify task management to help teachers save time?
How might we help teachers see valuable data & insights at a glance?
Prioritization Matrix
I compared a list of features on competitors' platforms to a list of features already on Seesaw to create a list of features that were missing from Seesaw. I assigned a value to teachers and the effort required to implement each feature in order to determine what features should be included.
Site Map
I put together a site map of the current Seesaw platform, and then added in all the elements that would be included on the dashboard to highlight how the new feature connects to the existing site.
03: Design
Once the product was defined I moved onto the design phase to determine what the new feature would look like.
The goal of the dashboard is to create a clean, consolidated view of all the actions teachers must take that are independent of a specific class and give teachers an overview look of their day at a glance.
Wireframes
I created multiple versions of the new feature, using a combination of dashboards from direct competitors, communication platforms, higher ed learning management systems, and general dashboards for admin/teachers as inspiration.
After going through a few iterations of wireframes, I landed on this version of the Dashboard because it focused on the quick actions teachers can take from the dashboard and incorporated features that address specific pain points users had.
Using Seesaw’s existing styles I applied UI elements to my dashboard wireframes for all 3 views of the schedule (day, week, month) and built out a basic prototype with interactions for usability testing.
04: Test
After creating the prototype, I conducted a usability study to better understand how useful each of the dashboard features was.
Usability Testing
During usability interviews, participants were given background information about each of the sections on the dashboard and then asked to provide feedback on what they like & dislike, how it could be improved, any expectations they had & how the dashboard would connect to the rest of the site.
Findings
All users described the site as easy to use, easy to understand, & easy to navigate.
All participants would use the different calendar views depending on what they were working on, but weekly & monthly were the most relevant
All participants found the reminders section very useful
Participants would like the option to customize which actions were visible in the quick add section
All participants found the messages section very useful & expected the same interactions with the buttons
Participants would prefer to have different options for viewing the information being presented in the activity overview section
Participants did not find this section useful or the data shown relevant
Participants were expecting different interactions with the schedule & reminders sections
Key Revisions
After synthesizing the data from the usability test, I was able to start seeing patterns in the areas participants had success or difficulty with. Once I identified the most common pain points, I determined that the priorities to focus on for the next round of revisions were:
Created a Class Overview section with nested tabs to give an actionable overview of the data in the Activity Overview, This Week In Seesaw, & Class Roster by class
Include a drag & drop and an option to tag classes in the Reminders section so users can re-prioritize & categorize their tasks
Add a hover interaction for the classes in the Schedule section to provide more information & default to the weekly calendar view instead of the daily
In the Quick Add section replace Browse Library with Create New Activity, since this button is redundant
Reflections
Direct access to the end user was a challenge, so I needed to get creative in how I found the right users for research & usability
The insights uncovered during the research phase, especially from competitive analysis were really important in determining what features were missing from the Seesaw platform.