Plasma Games Teacher Portal
Plasma Games
A personalized online portal where teachers can explore, assign, and review activities and educational games for their science classroom.
Responsible for all aspects.
The Challenge
Teachers need a platform through which they can easily find new Plasma Games resources, deliver them to their class, and review student performance. How might we create a portal that enables teachers to take these actions while saving them time and energy?
Success Criteria:
Increased Login Rate of New Teachers
Increased # of Lessons Used Per Teacher
Increased Retention Rate After 30 Days
Research
I began the process by collecting and analyzing direct user feedback on the original teacher portal to find actionable improvements such as: Creating a unified design, adding in personalization to individual experiences, and keeping things easy to understand and navigate.
Along with this, I conducted market research of similar products, identified key user personas, and establish journey maps that would guide decision-making going forward.
The Solution
Plasma Games now offers a teacher portal where teachers can explore new and relevant educational materials, assign those materials to their classes, and review automatically graded student data.
It also learns teacher’s unique lesson plans via machine learning over time to keep track of which units they’ve taught and what will next be relevant for their classroom.
Wireframes
I then did several series of rapid prototyping where I created basic wireframes for each page of the portal and each use case from our user personas. Each iteration was passed through peer reviews where improvements would continually be made.
Design & Prototyping
After establishing a set of successful wireframes, my team and I began applying higher-fidelity UI to the wireframes, added basic click-through functionality, and brought the prototypes to user testing sessions. Each user test would highlight issues that would be fixed as well as giving us qualitative teacher feedback.
Takeaways
Once the prototypes were successfully validated, I applied finalized UI to the designs and worked closely with developers to implement the changes to the existing portal.
As an end result, the company was able to develop a functional and effective teacher portal that increased teacher usage and retention. The new designs also allowed us to make continual improvements to the teacher experience by adding new features such as a favorites system, improved lesson tagging, and deeper student performance analysis.