A Language Teaching platform that streamlines content and minimizes prep time for teachers
Task: UX Design; Prototyping & Front-end Development; Information Architecture
Role: Product Designer; Team Lead
Challenge
Transform a paper-based teacher-facing early childhood literacy curriculum into an interactive, user friendly online experience for both students and teachers.
Outcome
World of Words, a digital platform that simplifies pre-class preparation and in-class presentation for teachers through a slick user interface and unique sync solution between private devices and smartboards. The product has already been implemented in classrooms.
Problem
World of Words is an expertly curated curriculum proven to effectively build vocabulary and comprehension skills. However, training teachers for this comprehensive program is not easy – the program includes 10 sets, each with a 50+ page lesson plan, 5 share reading books, and 30+ picture cards. Teachers need to manage all these materials while teaching a class of 4-7 year olds. How might we use technology to help new teachers reduce pre-class workload and enhance the in-class learning experience?
Solution
Because the platform is quite content heavy and young students require teacher’s extra attention during class, we consider simplicity as our topmost design principle, and thrive for a crystal clear information architecture and minimalist style user interface.
Taking the “tech-phobia” of some teachers into full consideration, our solution includes two portals for separate devices – the “teacher” views serves as cure cards for teacher through their personal devices (phone, tablet, or laptop), while the “smartboard” view displays through smartboards or projectors for the entire classroom. Teachers can preview what is coming next on their personal devices in just a glance and sync the smartboard view with a simple click. Taking this simplicity idea one step further, we re-categorized and parsed the instructions on the lesson and provided it in the “just-In-time” way. From project planning to product launch, we finished the UX prototyping, content migrating, development and a full week of testing within less than a month. The project was finished on time and under budget.
I took on the roles of both a product manager and a product designer:
Product Design: conceptualize the technology solution (smart-broad and tablet based) to wireframe & prototyping, as well as user testing and Q&A;
Team Management: managed the workflow and collaboration of a virtual team, including a back-end developer, a graphic designer, and two interns for data entry;
Front-end Development: coded the front-end using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; also learned a ton from working with the back-end developer for database management.
This product was launched and implemented in classroom in Summer 2017. To explore our product, please click here.
Responses
No Response Found