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Along Student Profile
Increasing student engagement on Along web app through Student Profiles
Overview
Care for Caregivers Online (COCO) is a B2B startup focused on wellness solutions for caregivers via its proprietary chatbot, CocoBot.
For my grad school capstone project, I teamed up with three of my classmates to enhance how caregivers approach and practice self-wellness.
For six months from January - June 2021, we worked with the co-founders of COCO and the clinical and engineering teams. Our target audiences were non-professional caregivers caring for people with chronic conditions.
Role
Product Designer
Team
Elisabeth Dunn
Teresa Cummings
Miaoxin Wang
Organization
University of Washington Human-Centered Design & Engineering
(In partnership with COCO)
Timeline
January 2021 - June 2021
Overview and Project Highlights
- SLP Demo (demo.summitlearning.org) was an important tool for educating both new and existing SLP users on the functionalities of SLP. Driven by concerns over high maintenance costs, complexity, and usability issues, the leadership decided to cease operation of SLP Demo.
- I led the transition from the high-maintenance SLP Demo to a streamlined Figma-based alternative. I initiated the strategy, conducted user research, and executed the design end-to-end, significantly reducing complexity and operational costs.
Organization
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
(in partnership with Gradient Learning)
Product
Timeline
Jan 2023 - June 2023
Role
Lead Designer
Team
Product Specialist (Project co-lead)
Content Strategist (contributor)
Support Specialist (contributor)
Product manager (inform)
Overview
New teachers and school leaders of Summit Learning Program were struggling to navigate training resources.
I teamed up with the content strategist to redesign the Information Architecture of Learning Space, a content repository on SLP.
This redesign resulted in reduced support tickets for the O&T team and enhanced user experience for educators during Summer Training 2022.
Role
Lead Designer
Team
Content Strategist
Product Specialist
2 Software developers
Product manager
Data Scientist
Organization
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
(in partnership with Gradient Learning)
Product
Timeline
Jan - June 2022
Overview
EV drivers of Delhi go through range anxiety, which leads to slower adoption of electric vehicles.
As the founding designer of Aufbau Technologies, I worked on the charger app called 'Turbo', and the marketing website, defining the UX strategy, performing user research, and establishing a cohesive visual language for the entire organization.
Role
Founding Designer
Team
Cofounder
CTO
Organization
Aufbau Technologies
Timeline
September 2018 - March 2019
Overview
Along is the teacher-student connection builder designed for educators to build meaningful 1:1 connections with their students.
I worked on a tool that lets teachers build deeper, more meaningful connections with students to enhance classroom engagement.
The tool resulted in a 10% increase in teacher engagement, and fostered a culture of student wellbeing and engagement.
Role
Lead Designer
Team
BrandDesigner
UX Researcher
Product Manager
Software Developers
Product Specialist
Data Scientists
Content Designer
Content Strategist
Along is a digital reflection tool used to deepen student-teacher connections. It helps teachers build meaningful 1:1 connections with students by asking them questions about their life, reflecting on those questions with student data tools, and acting on that data by replying to the student. This forms what is called an 'ask-reflect-act' loop.
Project Goal and Hypothesis
Goal: Build a tool that lets teachers build deeper, personal connections with each student to enhance classroom engagement.
Hypothesis: Using the new tool, teachers can better understand their students' lives. This helps them teach in a way that fits each student's needs, makes learning more interesting, and creates a classroom where everyone can do well.
Business Goals: To increase the number of teachers who keep using Along by 15% every year. At least 7% more engagement with Along in the first month of releasing the feature. At least 18% of Along users to engage with the Student Profile in the first month.
Student Profile Launch in July 2023
The Student Profile was launched in July 2023, for the school year 2023-24.
With additional research, we released learner side of Student Profile to let students express their individuality through research-backed and carefully-crafted questions.
Impact
Short-term Impact
- After the release of student profile, we saw the engagement of teachers shoot up by 10% in the first month, at par with our success metric set by the team.
- 22% of Along users engaged with Student Profile after first month of releasing it.
Long-term Impact
Educators connect more openly and engage differently in the classroom after using Student Profile.
- 81% of teachers said that Student Profile can help them be more open with their students.
- 83% of students said that Student Profile can help their teacher get to know them
Learnings and Reflections
For me, biggest challenges in this project were:
- Working with the PM to balance business goals and user satisfaction
- Understanding the school ecosystem and making solutions that make school leaders, teachers and students happy.
The biggest things I learned were:
- Build a solid and flexible foundation for the ever-changing and complex education system.
- Be teacher’s best friends!
Responsive Guidelines for Along Design System
While working on Along, I realized that designers and developers did not have a cohesive system of determining UI on different screen sizes. This often led to inconsistencies in designs and longer communication times.
I looped in the brand design team, design systems team, and software engineers to understand the requirements of a responsive system. I held a brainstorming workshop where we jotted down ideas on how elements would behave on smaller screens and different breakpoints.
Based on the workshop, I introduced responsive design guidelines, which resulted in quantifiable improvement in cross-device user experience. These guidelines pushed the team towards thinking about a mobile-first approach.
Thereafter, I created reusable design system components for different screen sizes.
Impact
- The new demo prototypes were extensively used to train ~1000 new teachers during spring and summer training 2023.
- The project managed to save the support needed from ~10 teacher support specialists every year during summer training, which amounted to 300 hours saved during the entire week.
- Ultimately, this solution saved 15 dev-week/year and 200k/year for the organization. This effort was lauded by the leadership, including the director of product and director of design.
Impact
- Support Ticket Reduction: Achieved a 30% drop in support tickets for finding resources, validating the direction and enabling educators to focus on teaching.
- Time Efficiency: Redesigned interface that reduced educators' resource search time by 17%, enabling them to invest more time in their core mission.
- Heartfelt Impact: Centered on educators, these positive changes resonated at the heart of the platform, celebrating the real victory in enhancing their daily routines.
Reflections
- I attended the Summer Training in New Orleans (2022), and saw the real-time implementation of the features, resulting in a significant jump in accessibility. It made me realize the impact of my work, making me proud to be working in education.
- Biggest learning: How to work with the design systems team efficiently to include their feedback early in the project.
- Biggest challenge: Working within tight engineering time and resource constraints to launch this project.
- What I would do differently: I would negotiate for more time and resources on this project, to ensure optimal experience for users.
