about
I was brought on to design a new interface for Picardy, an online interactive platform for developing theory and musicianship skills for teachers and students. I updated the UI/UX with the focus on the educator’s experience, working primarily on key Picardy functionalities, including redesigning the teacher’s dashboard, data visualization tools to assess students’ performance, and building classrooms and curriculum, with an emphais on scalability and driving engagement.
overview
Picardy’s current educator experience is adequate for the needs of its users. However, in light of Picardy’s growth and expanding user base, the team recognized a need to improve the onboarding process for newcomers, and to build a more scalable system that can adapt to new features and additions. My work at Picardy is a good representation of the range of my strengths as a product designer – I was brought on to solve problems such as increasing user engagement in the admin portal and improve key functionalities and overall usability of the platform.
who are we designing for?
“Having more features that make it easy way for teachers to assign something to students and get back results without having to go back through grading is probably the best thing that Picardy could do.”
user research
In order me for to best advocate for Picardy's users, validate ideas, and build an overall strategy, I designed user testing exercises and conducted interviews with teachers and students. I interpreted research findings into a series of target user personas (examples above, click to enlarge), which were then distilled and leveraged into concrete goals. Quotes like the one to the left were important to gain of sense of the real world concerns that would drive visual and strategic decisions in the final design.
Evaluation
The current Picardy dashboard interface for educators was cluttered and felt Frankenstein'd together, with a lack of a clear hierarchy and an inconsistent design language. There was little to no motivation for users to linger, and adding lessons to the curriculum involved having to constantly switch back and forth from the My Courses back and back to the Your Curriculum module (on the right.) I made recommendations to improve site content including typographical decisions, navigation structure, interface language, and searching content.
This meant distilling complex problems, user needs, and business objectives into actionable design goals. Moving forward, I led the design from concept through iteration and worked closely with the lead developer to define feature specifications, implement the new design, and produce detailed design and interaction specifications.
the new design
I designed the platform’s responsive user interface for the web to seamlessly guide users through the process of creating a classroom, viewing their students’ progress, and creating their classroom curriculum. There was also a need to provide a way to explore Picardy's vast collection of courses, so I developed an intuitive search functionality. The user interface of the dashboard allows them to rapidly build their classroom and curriculum, view stats on students’ performance through a smart back-end technology, and includes interactive touch points all the way through. (Click through for more details.)
final thoughts
Through qualitative and user-centered design methods, we were able to develop a new UX that enables a smoother and more streamlined flow for educators completing their day-to-day tasks on the platform. A successful redesign of the educator’s experience would have the added advantage of driving more students to sign up for Picardy through their teachers, and ultimately introduce more people to join and benefit from Picardy's services.
This project is currently in the development phase, and will go live in Fall 2018 (just in time for the new school year!)