The Literacy Project
Product Design | Dec 2021 - May 2022
Project Overview
I worked with my organization, Commit the Change, which is based at the University of California, Irvine to create this product for a nonprofit organization called The Literacy Project. The main goal of The Literacy Project is to offer supplementary support for 2nd graders who are more at risk of falling behind the literacy curve.
For The Literacy Project, our goal was to create an online data-tracking platform for teachers to manage scores and grades for their students. This would greatly improve the organization's processes as a digitized system offers more benefits, such as greater accessibility and a streamlined workflow.
Problem Statement
The Literacy Project admin spends an excess amount of time manually updating scorecards to their system. Several months are spent just updating this manually which is time that could be spent doing other work. Resources would be better spent if they could directly digitally input data.
Competitive Analysis
We compared the problems and needs of our clients to other similar products. We researched platforms including Google Classroom, MyLabs, and Seesaw. It gave us insight into possible functions that we could include in our own product. We evaluated the ways to organize the groups of students, how easy it was to manage large data sets, and data management methods.
User Flow
In creating our user flows, we had to manage two types of users, which are the administrators and the teachers. The administrators are in charge of the management of the overall program. Some of the tasks include creating new accounts for the teachers and managing sites. The teachers create student profiles, input data, and manage student groups.
Personas
The next step in our User Research was to create personas. We created three personas to emulate the different types of users that would be natigating this product.
Affinity Map
The next step in our process was to create an Affinity Map. Before our brainstorming session, we began to think about the different facets of the hypothetical software that we would create. After comparing notes we then group our thoughts into four categories. The four characteristics that we identified were user-centered design, accessibility, terminology, and functionality.
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Some questions that I specifically had while brainstorming were about the user experience. I wanted to make sure that the interface would be easy to use, especially with having a lot of different sets of data nestled within each other. Affinity mapping was really valuable in the process of guiding and correcting our design process.
Lofi Frames
High Fi Frames
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Results and Takeaways
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Be well prepared. When working directly with clients, it is very important that you are prepared to answer any questions and concerns that they have. It was my first time working solo in a client-facing role. I conducted user testing with one of the teachers who works with The Literacy Project. There were several instances where the user struggled to understand the UI which resulted in me having to guide them gently to move on to the next phase of the testing.​
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Teamwork makes the dream work. During this project, I was very grateful to have such a well-rounded team working with me. I was able to learn from them and their design processes. Doing design with a group is super beneficial because it teaches me to be more creative and to see the alternatives to the design solutions that I normally would default to.
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The easier the better. When designing, the main rule of thumb is to design for simplicity. One of the main themes that we wanted to keep while designing was to keep everything easy to read. There are a lot of different sets of data that we need to manage when making this program. We asked ourselves how can we incorporate color, pages, and tabs.