“INTURO” web/mobile app design

A new teacher preparation app

Roles: UX researcher / UI designer

Overview

To showcase my expertise in UX research, I initiated an independent project aimed at helping reduce the teacher turnover rate, increase teachers’ feelings of success, and ultimately help for-profit and nonprofit education institutions succeed in completing their mission of providing quality education to all students. My process included stakeholder mapping, persona creation, stakeholder interviews, Interface design, and testing to help bring this project to life.

Teacher turnover has increased substantially over the past two decades: 5.1% of public school teachers left the workforce in 1992, while 8.4% left in 2005. Looking at these statistics, Teachers are most likely to quit in their first few years. - Learning Policy Institute

Opportunity Statement

• How can I make it easy for teachers to reflect on their teaching practice and change behaviors that negatively impact their work?

• How can I give teachers easy access to teaching resources?

• How can I design an application with a great user experience?

Process

Empathize

Hypothesis

If new teachers have access to teaching resources and quality coaching, they will be more likely to succeed and stay in the profession for over five years.

Interview

I started with interviews to get an understanding of what new teachers were struggling with. During my interviews with educators, administrators, and teacher coaches clarified that teacher “preparedness” was the most important "resource" students need. Focusing on this, the application could have a more lasting impact on students and teachers.

Target end-users

• Veteran Teachers

• New teachers

Direct Research

• 1:1 interviews

• Secondary research

• Competitive research

Define

Key takeaways

• “Teacher Coaching” conversations are essential to help teachers grow their skills

• Being able to reflect on coaching conversations at a later time is essential to new teacher growth

• “Community” is essential to keeping teachers motivated

• Open-ended questions are best for allowing for reflection and growth in teaching

USER Requirements

User requirements/tasks that I created based on takeaways from interviews. These would later influence the user flows and become features for the application.

• Complete a lesson plan following state standards

• Review past lesson plans

• Access teaching resources

• Create and share reflection journal entries, best practice tips, and tricks with other users

• Teaching Coach chatbot

• Chat journal function

User tasks

Ideate

Look and feel

Inspired by the prominent use of primary colors in grade school buildings and educational materials (workbooks, flyers, etc.) I decided to use these colors as a starting point. I later incorporated colors in the mascot logo design and went through a few iterations before. Based on input from preliminary interviews, I came to the "Apple teacher" logo.

Typography (Accessibility)

I chose “Source Sans Pro” for the application because of its easy legibility on small and large screens. Colors were selected to create a strong contrast to help with legibility for the varying eyesight of end users.

Prototype

During the prototyping phase, I used findings from the research/interviews and referenced Web Content Accessibility Guidelines AAA standards to create the final concept. Below I have included three features to help encourage teacher reflection, community building, lesson plan creation, and knowledge sharing. I also created a stand-alone site for promotion in the link below.

Try Prototype

Click here to see Inturo promo site v1.

User Task

Next step / Takeaways

• Continue working on the Chatbot to give it a more natural and conversational tone.

• Integrate free Education API for resource suggestions with the Chatbot

• Continue with user testing, and focus groups to understand the needs of teachers better and further develop the prototype (Lesson plan creation, chatbot usability)

More Work