ITEM BANK REDESIGN
RESEARCH / COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS / USER TESTING / HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPES
The Problem
Administrators in the Learning Manage System use Item banks to manage, organize, and create new banks for Instructors to use. Banks contain existing McGraw Hill resources such as pre-made Questions, Tests, Assignments, and Lesson plans. Instructors are able to leverage these items to integrate in their class. Question Bank pages are widely used by Instructors to add existing questions to tests. The original pages had a large amount of technical debt and had been the source of numerous of defects.
The goal of the project was to create an improved experience so admins could easily manage and create banks, and instructors could intuitively find and add existing questions to their tests with minimal number of clicks. This project was planned 2 cycles in advance to allow time for research and multiple iterations.
I worked with several teams including UX Research, Product Managers, Engineers, and Business Stakeholders to redesign the workflows.
Original Question Bank screens below.
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Competitive Analysis
I started with creating a competitive analysis to see the uses cases and workflows of item banks inside our platform against its competitors. The goal was to view the results holistically and find out what users generally expect from an item bank as well as analyzing how the content is organized.
Image below is a feature analysis I created of our platform and our competitors.
I presented a high level summary of findings of the competitive analysis to stakeholders where I identified our competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.
Current Usage Tracking
To get a better understanding on how users interact with Question Banks, I collaborated with the UX Research team to collect data on tracking clicks. I was able to gain valuable insight on which features were frequently being used vs which ones were not. For example, we realized some important features were not being utilized because the UI was not prominent. This exercise also helped us develop questions for our upcoming survey and Focus Group sessions.
Sample mouse tracking screenshots created by the UX research team.
Focus Group Session
With the help of our business product manager, we conducted 3 separate focus group sessions with a total of 12 participants from various school district users. The goal of the sessions was to investigate the following objectives:
Get feedback on what users generally expect from a question bank
User views on how the content should be organized
Validate features that users would like to see improved or added to our platform
Sample clip from the multiple sessions.
Feature Requests
A list of additional features was compiled based on previous focus group sessions and surveys from the research team and was presented to the team. The features were then labeled from the level of importance and if was existing in the current platform which helped stakeholders and the team identify priorities for MVP.
Clickable Prototype
A low fidelity prototype was created based on feedback from our research and communication with stakeholders regarding important features needed for MVP. Multiple iterations were made before testing with admin users. Link to prototype below.
Final Screens: Administrator Pages
After multiple iterations on the low fidelity flows, I kept the overall look and feel of the question banks consistent with the original screens based off the existing style guide. New features were added and existing ones were rearranged which synced up with user expectations of working inside question banks.
The pages below are accessed from the Item Banks app on the side navigation which is only available for Administrators, and focuses on the new bank creation flows..
The original flow for creating a new bank was a single page form which overwhelmed users. In the new designs, users would first have to choose the type of bank they wanted to create. This information was originally hidden inside one of the dropdowns in the forms where information would update depending on the selected bank type. Selecting the type up front would help users categorize initially and only show forms that are relevant to the type.
After the bank type is selected, users would be prompted with a simple modal to create the shell of the new bank, which only includes Name, Description and Subject.
The user is then directed a page with tab navigation to guide them on a step by step process for creating questions, attaching standards, editing settings, and editing share permissions. This helped users focus on tasks for specific areas before moving on to the next one.
Final Screens: Instructor Pages
The page below is taken from the Assignments app with an Instructor as the user. New add question buttons allowed users to quickly add questions on the fly. Unnecessary design elements, text, and columns were eliminated to focus on features frequently used by Instructors.
Feedback
The final product was launched for back to school in 2018 and we received overall positive reviews with minor adjustments.
