Background
Teams for Education is a powerful platform, but user feedback indicates it can be complex for educators and students. We're simplifying the classroom's information architecture to improve usability and create a more intuitive learning experience.
My Role
I owned the end-to-end design experience, leading a collaborative effort with the core product team and partners across disciplines to deliver a seamless and impactful user journey.
Some questions for user study
How do K12 teachers use channels and apps on Teams today?
What apps & links do K-12 teachers add to channels?
How many channels do classes have?
Problems
💔
Mental Model Mismatch
Customer requests assignments to be a class-level app or included in each channel instead of living in the General channel.
🔍
Low Discoverability
Teachers & students couldn't find assignments and class notebooks within the class.
🐌
Low Efficiency
After seeing the tools in the General channel, they found it time-consuming and painful to access.
Hypothesis
We believe that moving class-wide tools from the general channel to the left rail will improve the discoverability and efficiency in the classroom.
Ideations
No-brainer way-finding for teachers and students.
Coherency with the navigation of teams/channels in enterprise
The clear mental model between the apps and channels.
Validation
Key items to validate:
The proposed Navigation model.
The order of the apps.
Same apps on both left rail & header.
The user testing session was conducted online with eight K-12 and two HED educators from the US, Canada, and Spain.
"I Like it. It makes finding assignments, grades, OneNote, and insights much easier.
– Nadine, high school teacher, TX.
“I do love the idea of these tabs being arranged on the left. In fact, some colleagues have asked about that."
– James, elementary school teacher, GA.
Outcome
Impacts
28% clicks increase on the team level apps from unique users in the back-to-school season 2021.
Highly positive verbatim feedback from customers worldwide.
(source: telemetry, and TAP customer feedback, May~Oct 2021)
My Contributions
Collaborated closely with PM and researcher to collect customer feedback and crystalized the problem statements.
Designed the detailed interaction, prototyping, user testing, and final deliverables.
Conduct design reviews and communicate the rationale with core teams and stakeholders.
Key Takeaways
Slight IA improvement leads to a significant user & product impact.
Spending 80% time making sure we are solving the right problem and the problem is worth solving.
Be crystal clear on which user segment and problems we are solving for clear scope.
To push for ideal product decisions - customer feedback > internal feedback.
Align the common goals, socialize the ideas and collect feedback from partners early.