Chloë S. Weatherly
Product Designer | Accessibility Advocate
Maths Pathway Mock.png

Maths Pathways

Maths Pathways approached General Assembly about a redesign of their teacher portal. Extensive user research proved that a solution around onboarding would be a more effective strategy for aquanting teachers with the functionality of the web app. 

Maths Pathways

View the InVision prototype of this project here. 

Collage of images. One screencap of white text on green background, a photograph of Post-It notes on a window, black drawing on white paper, a black screen with white text, a photograph of four people conversing,

Collage of images. One screencap of white text on green background, a photograph of Post-It notes on a window, black drawing on white paper, a black screen with white text, a photograph of four people conversing,

Image of text reading "What is Maths Pathway?"

Image of text reading "What is Maths Pathway?"

The Project

Maths Pathways came to General Assembly with a request to completely redesign the teacher portal of their web app. They believed that this redesign was required because their users--primary school maths teachers--were having difficulty learning how to use the program; often it took up to 18 months for teachers to feel comfortable using the portal.

Text "The Brief: Redesign elements of the teacher portal web app. Reduce amount of help teachers need to get started. Make next steps/possible actions clear at every point of the teachers' journey"

Text "The Brief: Redesign elements of the teacher portal web app. Reduce amount of help teachers need to get started. Make next steps/possible actions clear at every point of the teachers' journey"

User Interviews and Surveys

After attending a teacher training retreat and performing a number of interviews with existing users, it was determined that the difficultly teachers were experiencing was not with the User Interface (UI) of the portal, but rather with accessing the existing tutorial materials, as well as a lack of onboarding structure. These assumptions were verified by responses from more than forty existing users to a survey that was developed and evaluated by the team.  

Text with quotations of from user interviews

Text with quotations of from user interviews

Infographic representing the findings of self-reporting user surveys

Infographic representing the findings of self-reporting user surveys

Journey Mapping and Developing a Solution

User interviews and survey responses formed the basis for a journey map. I found in speaking with teachers at the Maths Pathways training seminar, that those who did the pre-retreat "homework" (training modules) felt much more confident in using the teacher portal than those who hadn't. However, because the retreat homework is e-mailed as a PDF to teachers, they have only minimal interaction with web app prior to the training. 

(click to see an expanded version)

If the homework and other training materials were integrated more effectively into the teacher portal web app, the teachers would have greater early access to the interface, which could result in

Design Studio

To improve the onboarding experience for the Maths Pathways program, a new tutorial section was designed and added to the existing teacher portal. This section restructured the existing information architecture and collated and displayed all of the tutorial materials provided by Maths Pathways, of which previously was found in five different locations and mediums. 

Five photographs of paper prototypes, bottom left corner is a photograph of three people sitting at a table drawing.

Five photographs of paper prototypes, bottom left corner is a photograph of three people sitting at a table drawing.

The group performed a design studio to develop this page. Above is the resulting paper prototype, which was then tested when three users before moving onto a digital iteration.

User Testing

I tested the paper prototype with three different users and iterated the design based on their feedback. My colleague Matt, then digitalized the design in Axure and performed additional user testing. 

 

Three black circles with small screencaps of a black website with white text. The word "ONBOARDING" in large letters in written underneath.

Three black circles with small screencaps of a black website with white text. The word "ONBOARDING" in large letters in written underneath.

Onboarding Prototype

My largest design contribution to this project was designing an onboarding flow for new and returning users. After performing comparative heuristic analysis of onboarding styles used in web apps, I developed two prototypes of onboarding flows, one for new users and another for introducing features to returning users.  

View the InVision prototype of this project here. 

Developing this onboarding process for first time and returning users was the client's favourite deliverable, and will be easily actualised in the future, allowing the Maths Pathway team to more effectively onboard new users in the future.

Success Metrics

  • Reduces number of ‘help’ queries

  • Increased number of teachers completing homework prior to retreat

  • Increased number of people completing training modules

  • Our newly created ‘Training’ be one of the most visited pages according to Google analytics

  • Increased Net Promoter Score score amongst teachers