PROCESS

Learning from Teachers

Teachers come in so many types! So I began this project by purposefully interviewing 7 teachers who taught different grades, had varying experience levels, and varying levels of technological familiarity. By observing the different needs and pain points across various teachers, I built a solid foundation for understanding the teachers’ experience.

Understanding the Needs

To sort through the varied information, I used affinity mapping to group the data into larger themes and then to better empathize with my core users I created an empathy map.

Through this process I uncovered the following needs:

Communication: Teachers need to check in with and provide help to students throughout the day. They use several different applications, from email to IM apps, to accomplish this now.

Accountability: During virtual and asynchronous learning days teachers struggle to keep track of what students are doing.

Control: To maintain a healthy classroom experience virtually, teachers need control over their tools and environment.

Uniqueness: Every teacher has unique circumstances based on their position, grade level, state curriculum, pedagogy, and classroom model.

Wireframing and Prototyping

After brainstorming and weighing potential solutions, I chose to design an instant messaging feature. Instant messaging will give teachers a flexible and fast way to connect with students whenever or wherever they are. Teachers are frustrated with the difficulties they have reaching students when teaching in a virtual or asynchronous class model. Creating an accessible connection will alleviate those pain points and help teachers build critical classroom relationships even when the situation isn’t standard.

I didn’t just want to add instant messaging to Google Classroom, I made sure to add features to solve pain points that teachers experience. For example, during my interviews, one comment I heard over and over was "students always ask me where to find an assignment". To help teachers easily address this need, I designed a flow to attach assignments within a message.

While increased communication is important, this must be balanced with a teachers ability to control when they are available to students. I knew I needed some way for teachers to communicate to students that they were not available for 24/7 messaging and I incorporated this need by adding a Do not Disturb status and an automatic messaging flag.

TESTING AND RESULTS

Once I completed the wireframes, I created an interactive prototype in Figma and conducted remote moderated usability testing with 5 teachers who currently use Google Classroom. To ensure this solution would work for all teachers, I selected teachers from different grades and technological experience levels to test with.

Positive Feedback

“I love it, we need to communicate with students who aren't in the classroom, and even if they are, this would be very helpful" - Kindergarten Tech

“I wish we had this!" - 8th Grade English

“Sending assignments would be very beneficial, with the amount of times I have kids ask me, ‘Where is this?’ ‘How do I find this?’. I can send it to them and just say, ‘Here’" - 4th Grade Teacher

Areas of Opportunity

Status Setting: Teachers struggled to find the controls to change their status or set an automated response message.

The Fix - Increase the visual importance: I knew from my interviews and later testing that teachers would find this feature useful, but it was too hidden away. To draw teachers towards this critical feature, I would increase its visual importance on the screen. There is also potential for this to be integrated with a teachers Google Calendar and have automatic messages enabled during certain time periods.

Vernacular: The language used for labelling some buttons and headings wasn’t intuitive to some testers.

The Fix - Learn how teachers talk: Another lesson I learned is the importance of communicating in language that your users are familiar with. Some relabeling of buttons and headings is nescerarry so teachers understand what things do. For example, to attach an assignment, the teacher can select from that student’s assignments or “All Assignments”. During testing most teachers could guess what “All Assignments” meant, but felt it was overly vague. When I probed deeper they thought the label would make more sense as “Class Assignments” instead.

REFLECTION

One of my biggest areas of concern for this project was matching the look and feel of Google Classroom. I wanted teachers to think this was designed by Google themselves! While designing I constantly referenced Google Classroom, Google Hangouts, and Gmail. To my joy everyone who tested said the additions looked completely native.

During the COVID19 pandemic Google Classroom has become a pivotal component for many teachers and Google has been making frequent updates to the platform, but they have yet to address some of the core challenges teachers face. Teachers and students are feeling more disconnected than ever and building those relationships in a virtual classroom is difficult. Based on the overwhelming positive feedback I received during testing, a solution like the one I designed is needed to start bringing those connections back.