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CLIENT
Practice Makes Perfect
TEAM
5 UX Designers
ROLE
UX research & design
Prototyping
Usability Testing
TOOLS
Sketch
InVision
Figma
DURATION
5 Weeks
Practice Makes Perfect (PMP) partners with schools K-12 to help level the playing field for low-income students and narrow the achievement gap by offering different programs, such as summer tutoring sessions, weekend and after-school sessions,
Tutors are integrated into classrooms to give struggling students the time and attention they need to excel in either math or reading proficiency. At the end of each week, tutors hand off data reports to admins. Admins then hand off monthly reports to partnered schools.
PMP supported over 7,000 students across 40 schools in NYC in 2019 alone. With PMP's growing student base, an MVP is needed to accommodate admin's needs to ensure quality and efficiency.
PROBLEM
Handling vast amounts of data has become very time consuming and tedious for admins with the growing number of students. Admins need an MVP that increases their efficiency and ensures quality.
SOLUTION
An admin-facing interface that allows users to easily compare data sets, identify at-risk students, easily find trends within data sets, and send monthly reports to school principals.
OUR MVP
Explore the data visualization platform here
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OUR APPROACH
Alt Text: Empathize with tutors and admins to identify goals and frustrations
Alt Text: Ideate concepts and test run
Alt Text: Converge most favored features from test run into one final product
Alt Text:
Usability test final product and iterate (over and over!) based on feedback
OUR QUESTION
How might student data be conveniently displayed and differentiated to suit the needs of each key player in PMP?
TALKING TO OUR USERS
To start the process of creating a full-bodied, usable platform, we took a closer look at the mechanics behind coordinating, collecting, aggregating, and reporting student data.
Because the process is mostly analog, we needed our platform to streamline both tutor and admins' processes.
INSIGHT
We noticed a pattern within our conversations between both admins and tutors. Each role served a different purpose, but they all had similar needs, goals and frustrations:
- Input and receive data in timely fashion
- Identify data trends
- Come up with personalized intervention for each student based on data trends
- Find scannable alternative to text-field notes section of data report
BRAINSTORMING
Our client had specific ideas on how student data should be represented.
To help our design team get our ideas flowing, we held a brainstorming session with our client. It helped each of us think outside the box and explore as many possibilities with our client as we can. It was a fun way to sort of “brain dump” and gain a better understanding of what our client expected to see in our final product.
INSIGHT
Both interventionists and admins were most interested in identifying at-risk student performance when analyzing student data. With that in mind, we needed our concepts to prioritize struggling students by categorizing each student based on their performance scores.
TOP 3 CONCEPTS
Alt Text: Performance Breakdown
Alt text: At-Risk Identifier
Alt Text: Performance Dashboard
We tested our concepts on the admins and several tutors at PMP.
Here's what worked:
Alt Text: Immediate data available on the landing page. Too many clicks discouraged users.
Alt Text: Seeing the overview in a short summary. Having to scan data to find out this info can be time consuming!
Alt Text: Using color to show students in each performance bracket. This was especially useful for users trying to identify the at-risk students within the data set.
Alt Text: Tutors thought categorizing the notes section was helpful and helped keep the notes section of session reports more organized.
Admins liked the breakdown of notes in categories because it helped them filter what information can be sent to principals in each monthly report
Alt Text: Tutors found comparisons of their students helpful for their work.
Admins liked comparing data between schools.
Alt Text: Admins liked the idea of being able to easily send a monthly report to schools with a click of a button.
FUTURE STEPS
Turn the interface into a mobile and tablet responsive website.
Our final product as of now is a desktop interface. We would like it to later expand to other screens to increase mobility and efficiency for our admins who are on the go most days.
Iterate on the Interventionist App for consistency.
We would like to see a more standard way of inputting data on the tutor mobile app to deliver quality and accurate data sets for PMP. Rather than inputting student data broken down student by student, we suggest designing the app that allows tutors to break down student performance by metric.
By measuring performance by metric rather than by student, it increases efficiency during each session and helps tutors identify problem areas within each student.
