my PRODUCT TEam
Watson Classroom
Watson Classroom is a set of products which help teachers plan within a web application called Enlight and engage with their students using Element, a mobile application. I contributed to two major releases and took part in our implementation in 9 school districts nationwide.
All designs you will see below have been released and are currently being used by teachers and administrators.
OUR CHALLENGE
Growing up in a family of teachers, the challenges we faced on Watson Ed deeply resonated with me. Teachers do so much work outside of the classroom and anything we could do to save them time was a win. In almost three years working with teachers, I was instrumental in delivering three key experiences:
Aggregate Student Insights: For our first release, we needed to create a way for teachers to derive insights and analytics across the various products already in their toolkit and give them a library of content to rely on.
Class and Student Mastery: We understood that a grade is not always an appropriate representation of what a student actually knows. To be transformative in the education industry, we needed to create a way for teachers to understand the true knowledge levels of students - beyond the grade-book.
Student Mastery: Show teachers how a student is doing, identify where they are having trouble, then give them the root cause so they could start with a good foundation.
Class Mastery: Once we could show teachers individual student knowledge levels and gaps, we needed to also show this information at a class level so that teachers could be more effective in planning.
Recording an Observation: In order for knowledge levels to truly represent more than grades, we needed to allow for teachers to input observations about their students. These observations might contradict grades in the grade-book for various reasons, but it would help to get a more accurate picture of the student.
View & Create Units: Knowing class mastery on sets of standards is interesting, but only useful when teachers can combine that information with the right scope and sequence for their lessons.
MY ROLE
At our largest, I worked on the same product with 7 other designers at one time and 60 developers. At our smallest, I worked as the sole UX Designer over two products with a Manager, Visual Designer, and 30+ developers, so I know how to delegate and collaborate on larger teams as well as how to prioritize effectively to continue delivering quality work that can be released in tighter conditions.
Design Standards & Documentation: I led the effort of defining/documenting our UX Patterns and Language guidelines, created our Sketch library, defined processes for writing acceptance criteria and design annotations, and created/maintained our site map.
Research & Testing: In addition to sketching and wire-framing, I created prototypes for concept testing and A/B testing. I received feedback from users no less than once a month through interview sessions with teachers and/or feedback sessions with principals and superintendents from each of our districts.
Cross Functional Communication: I recognized the value of working closely cross-functionally and created processes in which this would be facilitated early and often between offering management, sales, data, design and development. As our org grew, I created documentation for why, how and when to talk to each group.
Vision & Partnerships: In addition to exploring our internal vision, I was responsible for bringing partnership visions to life. I provided designs, prototypes and design strategy for how we could work with partners to enhance our offering.