Ed-Tech Dashboard Design
Client:
We empower leaders of organizations in the education ecosystem with the technology, support, and community of peers they need to achieve a positive and sustainable impact on education and our society.
My Role:
Out of a team of 4, I conducted 1:4 interviews, user testing, data synthesis, created sketches, graphic design elements, wireframes, and presentation design.
Team:
Elijah, Olga, and Zoe.
Level 1: Goal and User Research
Goal: To build an onboarding experience for education consultants while admin / buyer signs data agreements, in order to create an online community for educators and minimize product dropout from our key active users.
Challenge: Create an intuitive and efficient way for consultants to find use case dashboard templates, explore offerings, sign up, onboard / learn the platform, build personalized dashboards for their clients, organize clients, communicate and send client onboarding requests.
Key Results:
At least 4/5 in avg. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) survey
9 minute onboarding process (down from 4-8 weeks)
What we wanted to understand:
To uncover the problem we would be focused on solving, we worked with our stakeholders to understand their goals, business needs, and constraints.
We made decisions and formed interview questions for our user research based on assumptions to understand better how users could use dashboards to work with their clients and keep clients engaged during the waiting period before data was released into the dashboard.
We want to thoroughly understand the consultants’ services and how they work as a business and with their clients.
We want to see how the ed-tech’s platform/dashboards can benefit consultants’ businesses.
We want to learn the challenges they might face when they try to onboard to a platform/dashboard.
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
User Interviews
We conducted six user interviews and with our gathered data, we created an affinity map to make sense of the information, followed by a User Flow for potential dashboard design.
Affinity Mapping
Top 5 Pain Points Identified
Communication
Staff and Tech Issues
Product trial issues
Organization
Data Collection & Visualization
Top Findings
Collaboration between competitors, usually within two different industry spaces helps increase market share and both parties’ profit.
Ed-Tech seems to fit in the middle of the ed-tech space compared to competitors
It may not be that the users are not tech savvy, but that the product is not intuitive enough for all types of users
We discovered additional user problems while trying to solve for the original problem
Persona
Communications Styles:
Email
Zoom / Google Meet
Phone calls
Texts
Hand-written notes
Pain Points:
Multiple platforms for planning, data, marketing, and communication
Hard to see the big picture right away
Too much time is spent dealing with tools, not enough with clients
Motivations:
Doing the right thing
Equal opportunity for all students and leaders
Student success
Business growth
Discovery
Our initial focus was on designing an onboarding process and a dashboard for clients to use to build a customizable dashboard and a way of keeping users engaged while waiting for data release.
Based on our analysis and comparing that with our original goal, we realized most of our users needed something different and we readjusted our goal.
New Goal
Create an intuitive and efficient way for consultants to sign up for the ed-tech platform, learn how to connect with customers through the ed-tech platform, connect with ed-tech customers, organize customers, and send customer requests to connect and communicate with existing and future customers.
Level 2: Prototype
User Flow
After some brainstorming and iterations, we finalized a User Flow for our design.
With our new direction, we focused on creating a marketplace-type environment for our users to interact with their clients and collaborators.
Wireframes and Sketches
From our user flows we created sketches to create a low fidelity prototype
User Testing
We conducted seven user tests of our marketplace dashboard design.
Prototype
User Test Findings
In our first prototype, we had a walkthrough of how to move through the dashboard but users reported it was ineffective because the content on the page is very straightforward.
Most users like that the school cards show the school's needs. But they also hope that the needs can be categorized.
All the users like that they can choose different tags to identify their companies, but some of them are confused about the categories of the tags and some tags that they want to use are not displayed.
Some users suggested that the platform should allow them to upload their marketing materials, brochures, flyers and case studies.
Overall Findings:
Most users expressed positive opinions about the UI. They like how clean it looks and how clear the action items are. One user thought the user profile page looks too bland, while one user thought the text boxes in the conversation with school representatives are too colorful.
Some users have difficulties reading all the texts clearly.
Implications:
We should start to use primary colors and different scales of grey in high-fidelity wireframes to make the UI more personable.
We should either enlarge the text or make the text bolder in our design.
Next Steps
A dedicated contact person during onboarding
Sample or anonymized data for learning the platform
Ability to upload program documents ahead of time
An academic calendar with machine learning built-in
Built-in communication tool to keep in touch with schools that doubles as a CRM
Integration with Google products (and other tools)
A dashboard that has internal and external visualizations
A dedicated contact person during onboarding
Sample or anonymized data for learning the platform
Ability to upload program documents ahead of time
An academic calendar with machine learning built-in
Integration with Google products (and other tools)
Built-in communication tool to keep in touch with schools that doubles as a CRM
A dashboard that has internal and external visualizations