MACMILLAN LEARNING INSTRUCTOR AUTHORING

I was one of the first UX designers to join the Macmillan Assessment team. I assisted in bringing empathy and UX processes, which did not exist prior. We created a weekly iterative testing cadence to validate and iterate on design. Design was a bottle neck prior, with the addition of UX Designers, productivity and completion of Epics significantly increased.

OVERVIEW

Provide a simple, easy-to-use authoring interface so that instructors can create a majority of their content needs in Hatchling (name of authoring tool). Instructors will be able to create questions including math, chemical equations, hyperlinks and tables.

Hatchling will allow Macmillan the capability to preserve Authorapp’s complexity and flexibility for rich authoring needs while also enabling lower fidelity content to be easy to author.

INSIGHT TO MACMILLAN’S PLATFORM INTERACTION

WORKFLOW BETWEEN PLATFORMS

USERS

Instructors and internal content editors.

RESPONSIBILITIES

I was the sole designer responsible for user research and testing, wireframes, prototypes and deliverables. I worked closely with a Project Manager and stakeholders to gather insights throughout the process. My daily interactions were with a Project Manager, Engineering, Developers and QA. After each sprint I would present my findings from research and testing to stakeholders. Based off of instructor feedback, my task was to create formatting for math, chemical equation, links and tables.

DISCOVERY

I wanted to understand who I was designing for and what was necessary to build. I sent instructors a google survey to gather insights about what was important to them.

INSTRUCTOR FEEDBACK

Formatting prioritized for question creation.

INITIAL SKETCHES

ASSIGNMENT CREATION TOOLS

USER TESTING

The different question creation formats were tested. I spent the majority of the time on AB testing the math palette as stakeholders were divided regarding design implementation.

MATH PALETTE AB TESTING

I wanted to identify which keypad provided more value to the instructor. 6 out of 9 instructors found Version A to be more useful.

9 | Total Instructors 3 | Days of testing

CONSTRAINTS

Design and implementation had to be completed within 1 month. The new feature needed to be designed and completed before the new semester started, in order for instructors to utilize the new functionality. I had to conduct user research, user testing and design under the time frame mentioned.

LESSONS LEARNED

I gained a lot talking to instructors before designing the new feature. I initially thought instructors didn’t want to author their own questions and were happy with content editors creating questions for them. Instructors were very excited to have the ability to author their own questions, I was happy to be able to build out a feature they found valuable. Another thing I learned was not conducting an AB test with the same user but to test two groups separately.