My Role
Define the problem
The primary users of this product are School IT administrators. Understanding their practice of the product is the key to redesign the existing workflow. Therefore, the product manager and I decided to use both quality and quantity research to deeply understand their end goal and pain points. User interviews, usability testing, and data analytic were the methods we performed. Here are 3 key points that I found:
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Edit Policy - Overtime and time-costly in usage
Based on the user's interview, I noticed that managing online content and permissions was a small part of a school IT admins' daily routine. They were pulled in other duties like maintaining the school's IT devices, network service, educational electronic devices, etc. They felt frustrated when spending too much time on operating tedious filters for managing web content. For example, there was a long list of settings operations to be presented on a single page. It was not friendly to review. I found 1/3 of setting values that asked the user to decide tended to be rarely changed.
Policy creation- Disconnected workflow
By the user interview and user journey map, I found a sequential workflow was broken into disconnected operations in separate flows. Users had to create a policy in the Policy Editor tab and then go to a different tab, Policy Map, for searching a proper group to add the policy to, which was not intuitive and confusing to the users.
School IT Admin
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Monitor Activities - Low usage of the dashboard
The dashboard was designed to provide a comprehensive presentation of monitoring activities for users. However, our backend data showed most of the users actually did not actively browser the dashboard as expected. Through the user interview, I learned that the reason was, to the users, the information displayed on the dashboard was not very helpful. For example, screening the flagged students and activities was one of the main duties of the school IT admins, but the dashboard didn't illustrate such information.
How to approach
1. Establish Design Principles
2. Coherent workflow of policy creation
Instead of breaking the policy creation process into two disconnected subflows, my idea was, right after the create policy step in the creation flow, adding a new step “Assign” by which the newly created policy can be directly assigned to the corresponding group afterwards. Considering a case that the group hadn’t been created, it should provide a way to create a new group in this “Assign” step without breaking the workflow.
Ultimately, the updated flow should be [select policy type - assign to the related group-(create a new group) - finish the settings.
3.1 Efficient policy setting list
First, I selected the filtering setting list for the must-be-blocked items, like, porn, bloodiness and violence, etc. and combined them as one default block. These items took 1/3 of the whole list. Usually users don’t need to manually option on/off these items anymore, which makes for a better life. Secondly, instead of showing all items in a whole list, I used multi navigation tabs for listing items separately, by category, which would reduce users reading pressure.
Prototype
4. Build design system for consistency
3.2 Efficient dashboard information
The value of the dashboard provides users with highlighted multi-factor accurate useful data from massive annoying information for helping them fast proceed. I summarized 2 types of data most valuable to users based on my analysis of user journey and 1-1 interview.
Demo
Final UI
Testing, corporation, and result
The design team collaborated with PM to perform a user testing right after when every single section was finished. Before user testing, I worked with the PM on a task list, a question list, which asked for each participant to complete. We observed how participants interacted with the product and scored each task by rubric (so-called “Complete Difficulty Score”). We focused on analyzing and resolving the task of high Complete Difficulty Score, which could be hard to complete in time.
Result
Ultimately, the entire redesign took 3 months and succeeded in retaining 32% of users after the free trial. Meanwhile, the revenue increased 12.8% in 4 months after release.
