Introduction

In the twenty-first century classroom, hands-on and inquiry-style lessons often replace lectures, and teachers are encouraged to talk less and less, leaving more space for student voices. TeachFX aims to increase student engagement and promote more meaningful and equitable classroom dialogue. Teachers record their lessons, and the TeachFX AI analyzes these recordings, providing detailed reporting to help teachers reflect on their talk patterns and improve their practice. While the technology can be extremely powerful, the TeachFX team saw that nearly 50% of users (even those with paid accounts) had never recorded a single lesson. As my industry design project for my course at Springboard, I was tasked with understanding why users weren’t recording their lessons and thinking through possible design solutions to get more users to take that first leap.

My role: UX Designer
Worked closely with the Head of Product

My RESPONSIBILITIES:

• conducting stakeholder interviews

• conducting user research

• summarizing my findings and providing design recommendations

• creating new user flows

• wireframing design solutions

Research

Stakeholder Interviews

I began my research by conducting stakeholder interviews. I knew that various members of the team interact with users in different capacities, and I thought it would be useful to start by understanding the unique perspectives of the TeachFX team. I spoke with the Head of Product, the Head of Partnerships, and the Director of Professional Learning (who is a former professor and Director of Leadership Degree Programs at the Stanford’s Graduate School of Education).

GOALS:

• Learn from various TeachFX team members who work with users in different capacities

• Better understand business goals, technical constraints, and usability problems

• Get an idea of what different stakeholders want and need from the product

Key insights:

• Getting users to make that first recording is a critical conversion because if you're not recording, you're not getting anything from the platform. Thus, the #1 KPI that the TeachFX team focuses on is the number of recordings per active user.

• Members of the TeachFX team have different theories as to why users are not creating recordings, some of which include:

  • Value takes too long to demonstrate in the app.

  • Usage isn’t self-directed by teachers.

  • Recording oneself is a vulnerable act.

User Interviews

After learning more about the app and the business goals of TeachFX, as well as gathering some ideas as to why users may not be recording, I turned to the users themselves. I reached out to current TeachFX users with paid accounts and asked to speak to them about their experiences with the product.

GOALS:

• Learn how current users are using the app (including their favorite features, pain points, etc.)

• Explore and identify the main inhibitors to recording

• Determine the best solutions for getting users to make the first recording and continue recording

While I was able to speak to a couple of TeachFX users, unfortunately, outreach proved extremely difficult, and I got very few responses to my emails. This was likely because I started working with TeachFX during the second week of the coronavirus pandemic, and teachers were having to shift their entire way of teaching to remote learning. The lack of response may have also been compounded by the fact that the very users I wanted to speak to were those who weren’t using the app as intended; they weren’t avid users who were regularly recording their lessons. While I was able to gather some insights from the teachers I did speak to, including one power-user principal, I knew I would need to find a way to gather more information about the TeachFX user experience.

Usability Test Sessions

Troubleshooting with the TeachFX team, we decided to pivot and conduct some usability test sessions with teachers who weren’t necessarily current TeachFX users, but who might be prospective users. I reached out to several current classroom teachers, none of whom had heard of or used TeachFX before, to run usability test sessions with them.

GOALS:

• Ensure the app is intuitive and easy to use

• Uncover any usability issues that may be inhibiting recording

• Add more data points to my user research

• Determine the best opportunities for design improvements

The sessions proved extremely insightful and helped reveal some interesting usability concerns that I felt could be applied to current TeachFX users and possibly explain the low numbers of teachers creating recordings in the mobile app.

Analysis

Affinity Mapping

After analyzing my recorded sessions and raw notes from my user interviews and usability test sessions, I created an affinity map to identify my participants’ common pain points. I saw patterns in my conversations that led me to key insights related to why users might not be creating recordings.

Key insights:

• Teachers are confused by and underutilizing the goal-setting feature of the app (which comes right before users begin recording).

• Teachers often don’t understand or misinterpret the data reports.

• Teachers can only see data at the individual recording level and cannot see high-level data nor cut their data in different ways.

• After seeing their data, teachers have no clear actionable next steps within the app.

Based on the main issues I identified, I was able to create a report for the TeachFX team that provided design recommendations for each issue.

Design

With a summary of insights and ideas for design solutions, I began reimagining the TeachFX user experience.

GOALS:

• Simplify the ‘Record’ flow as much as possible in order to eliminate any barriers to recording

• Integrate the ‘Record’ and ‘Schedule’ features, since they share a lot of the same functionality

• Make the data analysis reports clearer and easier to interpret

• Implement a folders feature in order to organize recordings and make data easier to cut in different ways

• Remove the ‘Schedule’ feature from the navigation bar (due to its limited functionality) and replace it with a ‘Data’ feature

User Flows

The first step was thinking through the critical user flows. I wanted to rethink the flows for creating a recording in that moment, scheduling a future recording, and looking at an individual data report, as well as create an entirely new user flow for viewing high-level data within the app.

Wireframes

I then created high-fidelity wireframes in Sketch in order to determine how different elements would be placed on each screen. 

Simplified Recording

To make recording a lesson as simple as possible, I designed a one-step ‘Record’ screen in which I removed the goal-setting feature and moved all naming and saving functionality to after the recording is complete.

On the ‘Save’ screen, I added a folder feature, making it easy for teachers to organize their recordings. I also made sharing and scheduling options quickly available on this screen.

Integrated Record and Schedule Functionality

I integrated the record and schedule functions so that when a user wants to schedule a future recording, he or she simply needs to adjust the time and date on the ‘Record’ screen to one in the future.

The new ‘Schedule’ flow also defaults to individual scheduled recordings that can be set to recur (as opposed to being able to schedule recurring recordings). These changes give the user more control over when and how often he or she wants to record.

better organized & CLEARER REPORTS

In order to make the existing data reports clearer and easier to sift through, I made a number of changes.

First, I incorporated the folder feature (mentioned above) into the ‘Reports’ screen, making it easier for teachers to sort through this list view of recordings and easily find the recording they’re looking for.

I also added clarifying language into the  ‘My Highlights’ section of the data reports, making it clearer to teachers what a highlight is and how they are selected. I provided teachers with more autonomy by building in functionality for teachers to add their own highlights (as opposed to just those identified by the TeachFX AI).

I also moved the link for the ‘How to read this report’ PDF to the first card of the data report and repurposed the last card of the report to be a built-in reflection section (instead of the questions in the PDF link currently provided). This gives teachers an opportunity for more focused, meaningful reflection and a reason to come back to the app after creating a recording.

new high-level data view

In order to help teachers see the value in recording and keep them coming back to the app to record, I added a ‘Data’ screen. This feature gives teachers the ability to see trends in their talk pattern data, highlight different types of data and cut it in various ways, and compare data across folders and custom time frames.

Further Recommendations

As this project was only 4 weeks long, I did not have time to implement all of the design changes I would have liked to see. During the project hand off, I also presented a strategy for next steps towards the app’s continued improvement, specifically around integrating actionable next steps within the app, bringing teachers back to the app and increasing the likelihood that they’ll become active users:

• Include personalized links to resources and strategies based on a user’s data and goals

• Provide personalized next steps for how to create future recordings and plan upcoming lessons

Learnings

Here are some of the key takeaways I learned from working on this project with TeachFX:

• Stakeholder interviews are extremely helpful in understanding the perspectives and goals of various people at a company, as well as learning the business’ needs.

• In presenting design solutions to those less involved in the user research, it’s helpful to point back to specific quotes or instances of user behavior in order to justify design decisions.

• While there are an endless number of design recommendations we can make as UX designers, we must also consider the resource constraints within a company—for example, an engineering team of 1!