Typing Club is an educational startup with a product used in schools across the country to teach touch typing. Teachers who use the product were having trouble remembering how to navigate through the classroom manager to find key features. Our improved design also needed to be scalable to Typing Club's future plans to create product lines in other disciplines.
The team started the project off by studying how other touch typing products and educational products implement reporting features and site navigation in their teacher portals. The main competitors in the touch typing space that we analyzed were TypingAce, TypingPal, TypingWeb, TypeScout, and EduTyping. Other educational products that we looked at were Khan Academy, Academic Earth, and EverFi.
We used both user interviews and surveys to capture data from users of the product and potential users of the company's future product lines. The teachers that we interviewed and surveyed had a range of teaching experience from 1 to 25 years. Overall, schools seemed to be adopting more technology as effective educational products begin to emerge in the market.
We created personas based on our user research to reflect the needs and goals of the teachers with whom we spoke. This helped us target the areas that we needed to focus on in improving the user experience of the current TypingClub interface.
Having the client come and participate in our sketching sessions was critical throughout the project because they had intimate knowledge about the users and the way the product is used. By having the client participate in the sketching, we were able to discover more details on the issues that the client wanted us to address, and potential ways to improve performance and functionality.
Whiteboarding as a team played a major role in allowing us to process information, map out user flows, generate ideas, and solve problems that we came across while working individually throughout the project. While we did not end up implementing everything that we drew on the board, each session provided us with valuable insights leading to the final design. Some examples of insights developed through whiteboarding include personas, user flows, page layout, and information architecture.
We wrote down every single feature within the current classroom manager on post-it notes and held a card sorting session to determine the best way to reorganize the navigation and eliminate redundant information.
At the start of the ideation phase, we made sure to keep an open mind by sketching and whiteboarding different ideas. Once we figured out the direction that we wanted to go in, I began to create wireframes of the "classes tab" while my teammates worked on starting to put together our client presentation. After several iterations, I consulted my teammates and did some quick user testing with other classmates to see if they were able to identify where to click to find key features that teachers need on a daily basis. We also were able to do a user test with a teacher who actually uses the product over Google Hangout and discovered some important usability issues that we needed to address.
We presented our competitive analysis, research findings, personas, and recommendations to the client. Included in our presentation were a mockup for the classroom view that Julia created based on our user testing results and a demo of a clickable prototype created by Nina. Overall, the client was impressed that we were able to take their complex site architecture and think about new ways to simplify the interface.