Student Onboarding and Class Enrollment

1. Introduction

• Project Overview: Research and Design led project for simplifying student onboarding to increase user retention.
• Problem Statement: The legacy system provided multiple ways for teachers to onboard and enroll their students into classes. Students would often get confused with how they were supposed to log into the system and join classes which would result in frustrated teachers having to deal with the fallout. Students creating duplicate accounts, students forgetting their passwords, teachers figuring out which way they wanted to enroll their class and then instruct their class on how to join.

2. Research

• User Research: User interviews with teachers. We were already practicing continuous interviewing so before the project started we switched our interview intent to focus on this particular problem.
• Insights: We already had an extensive backlog of insights from Product Board. As a team we would work with the training and support team to help gain a better understanding of insights directly related to the problems teachers had with onboarding students.

3. Design Process

• Empathize: Our first design studio session started with ensuring everyone that was working on the problem had a very deep understanding of the problem. With help from the training and support team we story mapped the current experience.

Teacher Creates the Student Account



Teacher Adds Existing Student



Student Creates an Account with a Class Code



Existing Student joins class with a Class Code


• Ideation: A typical group ideation session embraces the design sprint principle of “work alone, together”. We start with 10 minutes of individuals working on their own to come up with as many ideas as they can. I would encourage quantity over quality and give a fake award for who ever came up with the worst idea. As a group we would then share our ideas and give feedback and then start another 10 minutes of individuals working on their own.
• When it comes to picking the solution to implement, the team would narrow it down to the best three ideas with a vote based on what solution they felt would be the best for achieving the outcome and that would best addresses the opportunity.
• As a team we would then identify all assumptions for each of the three solutions. (Feasibility, Desirability, Viability, Usability and Ethical) During this time we would create story maps for each solution to ensure clarity and also run a pre-mortem.

Mapping the Proposed Solution

Teacher wants a new student to join the class



Teacher wants an existing student to join the class



Student clicks on the link when they are already in the class


• Assumptions would then be prioritized in order for us to create tests and experiments to validate our assumptions. Based on the experiments we are then able to pick the solution to move forward with.

Diagraming the User Flow

Each story map above was linked to the appropriate flow here, each of which was color coordinated.

Diagraming the System Flow

When the systems architect had a comprehensive understanding of the user flow, (which he helped design) he was able to design the changes and additions needed for our system.

Final Prototype

Conclusion

This feature was delivered just in time for a new school year to start. Initial feedback from the training and support team indicated that it was much easier for teachers to onboard their class and get all of their students into the program. Later on it was discovered that it was beginning to become a standard practice for the training and support team to aid teachers in setting up their classes as part of our pilot program which meant they were manually creating student accounts. This resulted in many teachers reporting their students were creating duplicate accounts when they would use the class link (which was designed to enable students to create an account by default, which could be turned off with a class setting.) There are a few things I would change to make this even better.

• Instead of having one link, I would change it to be two separate links, one students could use to create an account, another for them to login and join the class.
• This would remove the necessity of the teacher remembering to toggle off the class enrollment link
• We could also give the teacher two paths to go down instead of the three in the empty state. One path for adding and creating students, another for providing them a way for the students to create their own accounts.