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I began the research half of the project by conducting nine interviews with teachers who were all actively teaching remotely
Going in I was expecting most of them to primarily need resources pertaining to remote learning. My questions were therefor oriented around resource acquisition, organization, sharing. I made a point to differentiated between resources about teaching remotely, and resources used to teach remote classes.
During the interviews, I found out that my initial assumptions regarding the need for additional resources for remote learning was correct. The most sought after being tutorials for applications used to teach remote classes.
Additionally, many needed specific resources pertaining to their classroom subjects, with those that taught children needing more engaging resources than usual for teaching remotely.
During Affinity Mapping, I sorted the data from the nine interviews into pools based on similarity.
Afterward a few hours of sorting a hundred virtual post it notes, I labelled them to form insights.
Representing the distillation of the interviews, these insights inform the goals, needs and tendencies of the persona.
I also performed a feature analysis on several other websites that host resources for teachers. Noting in my interviews that Teachers Pay Teachers was the most common name drop, I paid particular attention to the heuristics of that site.
Interestingly, many of these websites, while all hosting resources, function quite differently from each other. Some are hubs for specific teaching communities, some are marketplaces, and others paid subscription services.
Of course, our persona, Allie, is a teacher. She's a teacher who's struggling with keeping her high school math class engaged while teaching remotely.
Allie's user journey shows how she might typically search for a resource. The most difficult part of her journey is in evaluating resources for her classroom. This to me indicates a need for specificity, and perhaps curation.
Teachers often have trouble finding appropriate resources to suit their needs, particularly during this pandemic where remote learning is required.
Allie is having trouble finding remote teaching resources that will help her engage students effectively. How might we help her find the most valuable resources quickly?
Now that I had distilled the research and identified our problem, I decided to prioritize search functionality to ensure a high level of specificity to suit Allie's needs.
Additionally, I thought some level of curation could also assist in achieving this goal.
This is a live prototype for my mobile mid fidelity design, made in Adobe XD. Give it a try! Note that this is prototyped to test a specific user flow, so not all elements are functional.
I placed 'Trending Searches' in the hero section in order to allow users to start a search immediately, followed by sign up and search buttons, and then a 'Popular Resources' section in order to highlight the most broadly useful resources.
This is a live clickable prototype for the mobile hi fidelity design. This is only prototyped to test specific user flows so not all elements are functional.
As with the mid fidelity, users were able to navigate quickly and efficiently, though there was valuable feedback on the visual components.
I was able to make a user flow that was straightforward and very quick to navigate to accomplish the primary goal of the website, finding resources quickly.
However our usability tests indicated that there is a need for even more filters of increasing granularity. Going forward I would add filter subsections. Additionally I would tweak the resource cards to appear more cohesive with the overall design.