Curriculum Application
Collaboration Feature
My role in the following study is as a User Experience researcher. My team existed of one designer, several developers, one business analyst and myself.
In an application for teachers that houses curriculum and resources, a new feature was projected to be added where collaboration between teachers would be supported. This feature allowed teachers to create their own personal space to plan their lessons, gather curriculum and resources, and have the option to share and collaborate with other teachers across the province.
Who?
Selection of teachers
Users
Teachers who have taught in the classroom for more than four years
New teachers who have less than 4 years of classroom teaching experience
Administrators/Leaders
Characteristics
Mix of people who are comfortable with computers/technology and ones who are not
Mix of people who teach different divisions (eg. K-3 teacher, a 4-6 teacher, a 7-9 teacher, a 10-12 teacher)
Mix of people who are school-based and central office-based
User Interviews
After interviewing several teachers about their process with lesson planning and collecting resources, it was discovered that they would copy-and-paste out of curriculum PDFs into Word or Google Docs to create and customize or highlight content in printed documents. Now that we had an application with the digital curriculum, we knew we needed to offer teachers the capability of capturing and customizing their curriculum content in an online space, with the option of sharing.
Areas in scope of the usability evaluation
Creating a shared space
Viewing a shared space
Moving curriculum elements over to their board
Sharing their space publicly
Sharing their space to a specific user
Results
Using remote testing with teachers on the province we were able to identify pain points and continued with one-on-one testing.
With the one-on-one task analysis I was able to narrow the tasks and observe workflow to provide input for the design direction. My measure of success is an increase in the creation of Boards within the application.
User Stories
Working with a Business Analyst on this project we were able to create user stories.
“As a Teacher, I want to add/edit a comment to a section in another Teacher’s space.”
“As a Teacher, I want to share my space with parents and students, so that they can see what learning outcomes will be taught.”
“As a Teacher, I want to include text boxes or details or descriptions to sections so I can add my own notes, scope and sequence, reflections, etc to my planning”
Working with the designer and developer I discussed the feedback received, and provided recommendations:
Provide a notes section
Provide a comment section
Allow the upload of third-party content
Simplify the collaboration form
They were able to address some of these and we remote tested again.
With these results we could see where improvement was occurring and where we needed to focus our efforts. Sharing and collaborating was still at 50% success and adding elements from curriculum was at 60%.
During the following sessions of one-on-one user testing I came across an interesting discovery. One of the teachers asked if I would like to test one of their student-teachers (preservice). The responses and discoveries I made impacted the direction we are now focussing on.
Next steps
When I continued with testing preservice teachers it was discovered that as they are in post-secondary and building the foundation of their workflow when creating lesson plans, finding resources, and collaborating with their peers, this user was going to be a major influence on the usage going forward. Veteran teachers had their systems and process created and we were developing something delightful in experience to entice them to utilize our application. Preservice users were still developing that process and our application could help them with that from the beginning. Unfortunately due to a change in government, this project stalled.