Discovery
An educational assessment company required a redesign of their flagship application. The issue was that college students and faculty needed an updated solution for submitting and assessing educational assignments. I took a look at competitors’ products to see functionality and interaction gaps between the products. Next, I interviewed tech support and implementation managers to note the positives and pain points of the current solution. I also sent out out a survey to faculty and students asking about their job/tasks, and how they interact with the current iteration of the product. For instance, it took extra clicks to perform tasks such as attaching assignments. Also, students could not edit Word and Excel documents directly in the application, which is a feature that was highly desired.
Design
In the discovery phase, I realized that students and faculty are two distinct user groups that have different tasks and workflows with the application. Thus I started to design a student view and a faculty view. Once we identified strengths, weaknesses, and what the students and faculty really want to get accomplished with the application, I started to brainstorm, sketching design ideas on paper and pencil. Once I triangulated on a few solutions, I created mockups in Axure. After discussion with and feedback from the product owner and business analyst, one of these Axure mockups was fleshed out with interactivity. On the faculty side, I mocked up a breakdown on where students were in the assignment submitting process. Alerts were on the right side.
Evaluation
I presented the completed mockups twice to groups of college faculty to get their feedback. The sessions were effective, and faculty's recommendations informed further design tweaks. For example, I modified the filter criteria to support the filters that faculty would actually often perform, such as by course.
Implementation
After the feedback sessions and design tweaks, I handed off the mockups to a visual designer. The mockups and visual designs were sent to developers. This portion of the process was also collaborative. During the implementation process, I performed quality assurance to make sure the product was faithful to the mockups and visual designs. After the product release, I wrote a set of survey questions to check for user satisfaction and ideas for iteration.