Role: UX researcher & UX designer

My team set out to research and develop a new homepage to improve the onboarding process in order to increase new user sign up for Uplift K12. Usability testing showed an increase in user satisfaction in the site after redesign.

Challenge

Uplift K12 is an online math education platform that was created by former teachers, Mehul and Michelle Shah, with the belief that math teachers should have easy access to high-quality, interactive teaching content that helps students build confidence and eliminate math anxiety. From stakeholder interviews, we learned that Uplift K12 has many unique features to support math teachers with prepared lesson plans and whiteboard functions. It also has educational math games to help engage students in active learning.

The challenge the site was facing, however, was that although several school districts had signed up for the Uplift K12 platform, there was not enough user engagement from teachers or students, and there were very few new users signing up for the platform.

Discover

In order to discover what barriers there were for teachers to fully engage with the Uplift K12 platform, I helped to design the contextual inquiry questions and interviewed five math teachers to learn about their insights regarding online teaching, especially in the age of Covid-19. Qualitative research was chosen for user interviews in order to gather rich data to learn about teacher experiences during remote learning in recent school years. The insights are summarized below.

Finding opportunities for improvement through heuristic evaluation

I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the website to help identify some opportunities for improvement. Below are some examples of usability issues that were found on the homepage:

What features do other online learning platforms have?

Once we had an idea of some opportunities for improving the current homepage, the team conducted a competitive analysis of the homepages and features of ten different online educational platforms in order to understand more about the usability of competitor websites.

The competitive analysis highlighted that Uplift K12 has unique features such as a whiteboard tool that can be used side-by-side with lessons and activities. The team decided to focus attention on these unique features in the demos for the homepage design.

How to prioritize different sections on the homepage?

In order to find out how to prioritize the order in which the homepage sections should be prioritized, I conducted a card sorting activity using Optimal Workshop with five additional math teachers, then used the results to determine the design layout for the homepage.

Define

Who are we designing for?

Based on the user interviews, I helped to create the following two personas to help guide the homepage designs.

Synthesizing all of the discovery research, it became clear that the homepage needs to be intuitive and the platform features need to be easy to understand to encourage potential teachers to sign up for the platform.

The problem statement was formulated by asking the following questions:

How might we…

1. …encourage potential users to sign up?

2. …design an intuitive onboarding process?

3. …highlight unique features on the Uplift K12 platform?

4. …allow users to easily understand the tools and features on the site?

Problem statement

Uplift K12 needs a more intuitive onboarding process so educators can explore the site features and sign up for the platform easily.

Solution statement

Redesign the website homepage to highlight prominent features through interactive demos and re-prioritize platform user flow.

Design

The team conducted several rounds of design studio to come up with the an intuitive homepage design. The following image highlights some of the sections that were determined by the information architecture card sorting.

Testing the prototype using persona user flows

After creating the mid-fidelity prototype, it was time to put it to the test. I participated in designing three different tasks that were based on how the personas, Patricia and Hector, would navigate the homepage. I then conducted one-on-one usability tests with six additional teachers to validate our design ideas. Qualitative method was chosen over quantitative in order to obtain richer data such as the ability to observe user behaviors and ask follow up questions regarding user preferences.

Results from the usability test showed that teachers did not like to scroll down on websites, which meant that all resources and important information needed to be kept to the top of the homepage. Additionally, as the users showed us most teachers were like the persona Patricia, who would rather dive right into the platform than to go through demos first. This meant we needed to decrease the number of demos placed throughout the homepage, and instead keep them to just the whiteboard area for users like the persona Hector, who may need demos in order to get started.

Based on the usability insight that teachers need a quick way to visually see how a lesson may align with curriculum or how a game is played, the team added icons that will allow users an easy way to understand a lesson or a game before exploring further.

High-Fidelity Prototype

Result after usability test

“This site is much more user-friendly compared to last (school) year!”

—A current user after trying the re-designed homepage prototype

Next Steps

1. Usability testing to obtain quantitative data on whether the new homepage design leads to an increase in user sign ups. A teacher who had used the Uplift K12 platform during the previous school year commented that the new design was much more user friendly. Further usability testing will be needed to validate the design decisions.

2. A/B testing to find out whether the decreased number of demo videos and increased ability to dive in and explore the whiteboard lead to more user engagement.

3. Redesign the teacher and student log in interface to discover whether an improved log in experience increases usability and intuitiveness for both types of users

4. Creating a math games portal for students to increase student interaction with their peers

Reflections

This project was incredibly rewarding to work on. I thoroughly enjoyed conducting qualitative research, both through user interviews and usability testing, because it was through speaking with teachers that we were able to get extremely rich data to understand deeply how teachers use online platforms, and then tailor the homepage based on teacher responses. The research results were compelling and allowed the team to design a much more intuitive homepage for educators.

Learnings for future work

Although I personally prefer qualitative research through contextual interviews, the project would have benefitted from having quantitative usability testing to obtain data on how much the homepage improved user experiences. The quantifiable data would help to validate the team’s designs. The need for quantitative research is something I will need to keep in mind for future projects to ensure accuracy in the research results.

Thank you for reading!