A professional network for teachers to share resources
In 2014, I worked with the Gates Foundation to develop an online community for US K-12 teachers. This hub connected teachers with resources and peers and enabled improvements to their the practice of teaching. After 2 years from the envisioning phase to a working Beta, we launched TeachersDo, an online professional network that had over 100 teachers participating in 500 discussions and sharing over 1,000 resources. As the primary UX designer on the product, I designed the core platform experiences including the posting workflow to review high quality resources, and the News feed feature to surface educational resources tailored to teacher’s needs.
Role
UX Designer at Artefact
Context
Client: Gates Foundation
2014-2016
Design collaborators
Craig Erickson (Visual Design Direction)
Dave McColgin (Project Lead)
Reece Dano (UXR)
Paul Hoover (Design Ideation)
Formative (Engineering)
Research
Before we began designing anything, we wanted to make sure we spent enough time truly understanding teachers needs for an online tool. For 3 months, we immersed ourselves in existing quantitative research conducted by the Gates Foundation and surrounded ourselves with qualitative feedback from teachers across the country. Our envisioning activities included...
In-depth Teacher Interview sessions
Early classroom visits helped us understand how teachers prepare for classes, what tools they use in class with their students, and overall gave us classroom context.
Concept Exploration
It was important to research and understand the crowded landscape of education technology. We learned the main challenges that teachers faced with existing offerings and defined opportunity areas that we can improve on.
Scorecard Workshop
Teachers participated in several workshop activities to identify what would make an effective solution. Activities like this matrix diagram helped establish what principles were most important to improving student outcomes and empowering teachers.
Our Strategy
3 Targeted Outcomes
1. Reduce the Hunt
Reduce the hunt for great lesson content by helping teachers collect and improve lesson ideas from each other and across the internet.
2. Reduce Isolation
Reduce isolation by connecting teachers to one another to learn, discuss, and build on their profession.
3. Improve the Practice
Improve the practice with tailored access to great professional development articles, videos, and resources.
Concept Refinement
We tested and validated which concepts would resonate the most with teachers needs. This required targeted rounds of feedback to help us understand which features to prioritize and build first.
Qualitative Feedback
I created several low fidelity concept sketches to help generate discussion and feedback about what teachers really need or don't need. These concepts were used as interactive prompts for in-person interview sessions with teachers.
Quantitative Study with 400+ Teachers
A study with over 400 teacher participants gave us quantitative data to determine which concepts were the strongest. Concepts that scored the highest demonstrated fulfilling teachers' needs by saving time to get appropriate materials for their classroom, helping them find professional development content, or helping them get collaborative feedback from peers
Private Alpha
During the alpha, TeachersDo was a private site that was focused on iterative design, rapid building and evaluation amongst 200 teachers. I designed the platform architecture and core workflows of the site such as posting content to each education community. I was integrated with a small Build team that coordinated design refinement, research feedback, and the new development of features.
My Approach
Thoughtful User Experience
Time is a limited resource to teachers, so this site required an efficient, straightforward, but structured way for teachers to share high quality resources that were most meaningful to them.
I also worked on features that sparked joy, such as profile pages that could reflect a teacher’s unique perspective as an educator.
Integrated Design Collaboration
As the primary UX designer on a small build team, constant collaboration with research, engineering, and program leads was required throughout this program. I was fully integrated in both the research and the Agile development process (daily stand-ups, sprint planning sessions & QA testing). Together, our team delivered a fully responsive web platform across desktop, tablet and mobile devices.
Impact
New Member Growth
Over 100 teachers participating in 500 discussions and sharing over 1,000 resources
After launching the site publicly, the user base grew organically by 53% from teacher word of mouth, without advertising.
Meaningful Engagement
Teachers were engaged and spent an average of nearly 7 minutes and viewed 13+ pages each visit.
High Teacher Satisfaction
“I believe that teachers need many ways to collaborate and share ideas with each other. TeachersDo fills that need.”
— Ann, Elementary School Teacher