EdCuration

Creating a seamless experience for educators to search & discover instructional resources and to connect with vendors.

EdCuration Product page preview on desktop and search results page preview on mobile.
Timeline

10 weeks

My role

UX Designer, Interaction Designer

Team

Oleksandra Gomon, Carla Orellana, Michelle Gabriel & YC Wang

Where it all began

EdCuration helps educators find the products and resources that help them support their students' needs and curriculum. It aims at making searching, discovering, evaluating, comparing and connecting to programs & providers easier than ever before. My team set out to design and effective and intuitive way for principals, directors of curriculum and other educators with a budget to navigate the marketplace, find, research, select and order instructional resources.

the challenge

We looked into how to minimize educator effort..

Having an extensive background in K-12 education, Timeri - the CEO of EdCuration and our client - knew first hand how painful and complex it is to find the right curriculum that meets the students' needs, complies with state regulations and fits the budget. So, Carla, Michelle, YC and myself set out to see what it is that EdCuration is missing in order to make the right resources easily accessible to any educator in the US.

..and ways for educators to connect with vendors.

EdCuration is a lead-generating marketplace. The goal of our research from the business perspective was to discover what triggers users to click on the CTA's and whether the existing ones work (in terms of labelling, visual hierarchy and placement on the website) or if that area needed improvement.

the process

Research

✓ Heuristic Evaluation

✓ Competitive Analysis

✓ Interviews

✓ Surveys

✓ Usability Testing

Synthesis

✓ Affinity Mapping

✓ User Persona

✓ Empathy Map

✓ User Journey

Ideation

✓ User Flow

✓ Focus Areas

✓ Feature Lists

✓ Mid-fidelity Prototyping

✓ Usability Testing

Final Design

✓ Style Guide

✓ Hi-fidelity Prototype

✓ Validation & Improvement

✓ Animation

research goals

I wanted to get to the root of the problem.

In order to define the design direction, we needed to get to know the users, the business & how the users interact with the business.

Who are educators?

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User Surveys

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User Interviews

What's the business like?

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Comparative Analysis

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Heuristic Evaluation

How do educators interact with the business?

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Usability testing

the research

Comparative analysis gave us industry insights.

While EdCuration does not have any direct competitors, we studied other services providing instructional materials (BetterLesson, Teachers Pay Teachers, Khan Academy etc.), as well as sorting & filtering rock star platforms like Airbnb & Udemy. We scrutinized best practices of navigation.

Competitor logos
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Sorting & Filtering

We studied common filter patterns and gained insights on how to categorize & prioritize them.

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Intuitive Flow

We looked into ways to reduce the number of steps getting the user from the entry point to CTA.

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Call to Action

Although some of the platforms we studied have a completely different business model, we identified useful CTA patterns.

Educators shared their needs and struggles.

Interviewing 5 teachers, 2 principals and 1 director of curriculum across the US, and conducting usability testing with them, had the most fruitful takeaways for our team.  

"Wait, I thought I was picking science"
"By the info on the product page it's hard to tell what it really is"
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Navigation difficulties

80% of the interviewees got lost at least once on the portal and needed guidance.

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Line of behavior

We identified that most commonly used filters were by subject, grade & resource type.

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Most sought-for information

100% of the educators were looking for grade, curriculum type, overview & pricing.

the synthesis
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Prioritizing

We categorized search methods and filters by frequency of use and established top-priority features.

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Relevance

Educators were overwhelmed with irrelevant results and the amount of information to go through when browsing.

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Sharing

When purchasing a resource, most teachers would need to present it to a colleague or principal first.

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Scanning

All of the product information seemed relevant but needed to be organized in a better way for easy skimming.

Persona avatar

Sarah Leclerc

Science Teacher, Public HS, NJ

  • 17 years in education
  • Head of department
  • 4 teachers on her team
  • Passionate about work
  • Meticulous researcher
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Challenges

  • Struggling to navigate the marketplace
  • Failing to get relevant search results
  • Overwhelmed by too much information
  • Confused by unfamiliar patterns
  • Inconsistent labelling
  • Needing approval from a colleague or principal
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Needs

  • Best possible fit for her class and school culture
  • Shopping within budget
  • Compliance with state regulations
  • Trusting a resource/vendor
  • Comparing different options

I got really empathic for Sarah.

Please meet Sarah from New Jersey, who's a dedicated and experienced science teacher. She manages a small team of teachers and has a budget for curriculum resources. Being very meticulous, she has to trust the resource she's looking into and has to know everything about it before she even considers sharing it with a colleague.

Problem Statement

HOW MIGHT WE help educators find instructional materials quickly & efficiently while being able to involve their colleagues and/or principals in the process?

ideation - round 1

I defined the entry points and the end goal for our user flow.

This was a crucial step in understanding how to guide educators throughEdCuration portal. I developed the happy path with multiple variables to outline this journey. At that point, it became clear that there were too many CTA buttons of equal importance on the product page and I needed to work on their visual hierarchy.

User flow

It was essential to outline focus areas and features to implement.

Cross-Platform

✓ Visual "declutter"

✓ Uniform Look

✓ Comparing Resources

✓ Global Navigation

Homepage

✓ Filter Hierarchy

✓ Visual emphasis on the filtering menu

✓ Carousel sections in place of never-used filters

Search Results

Search icon

✓ Tags (for easy skimming)

✓ Bulleted keywords in description

✓ Saving to favorites

Product Page

✓ Visual appeal

✓ Saving/sharing/printing options for easy pitching

✓ Hierarchy of CTA's

✓ Similar resources at the bottom

With this chart in mind, I moved onto mid-fidelity prototyping.

Entry Points

Old version vs mid-fidelity prototype

search results

Old version vs mid-fidelity prototype

product page & cta

Old version vs mid-fidelity prototype
testing & final design

We had the style guide in place.

We studied and reworked EdCuration's existing brand assets and put together a new and improved style guide.

EdCuration Style Guide

I noticed a significant improvement in following the happy path..

..during our second round of usability testing. Key metrics that showed improvement:

  • 50% increase in conversion rate (clicking on a CTA button on the product page)
  • Cut down educator time on task by 30%
  • Improved user satisfaction - 100% of participants agreed that the portal was much easier to navigate with the features that we had introduced.

With that said, most of our solutions did work but needed minor adjustments.

Expanding grade range

Introduces separate tags for each grade as opposed to the grade range on You Selected, so that the user can edit on the go.

Following common pattern

Moved the Reviews section from tabs to the bottom of page to follow a more common pattern.

More bulleted keywords

Added more bulleted keywords to product description.

A recognizable icon

Sharing icon was hard to recognize, so it needed replacement.

A more appropriate icon

Replaced "Let's Talk" icon for a more appropriate one (the paper plane is has way more symbolic connection to the school environment).

the prototype

It was time for a major makeover.

Using the style guide and the usability testing insights, we ended up putting together 24 screens capturing all of the app interactions around filtering resources, browsing suggestions, exploring product information, saving and comparing materials.

I created a smooth transition from the CTA button to the messenger app.

This interaction allowed to integrate the newly introduced messaging system designed by another team.

the handoff

Putting it all together

Our prototype, the style guide and the UI element states were annotated within the Figma file and handed off for development.

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Future Considerations

  • Improve design & development collaboration
  • Find a way to get users to review resources more
  • Improve user dashboard
  • Login/Sign up via Social Media

Let's work together!

I'm open to new design projects and I'm always excited to take on new challenges, so do not hesitate to reach out to me directly.

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