My Role: Senior Product Designer
Top Hat is a teaching platform for university professors. The gradebook allows them evaluate student grades and make necessary adjustments. Our engineering team had delivered an new grading platform, yet professors still preferred the old version.
The profs we interviewed confirmed they preferred the new design, but it did not have the robust feature set of the old.
Our analysis showed a growing body of "switchers", users moving back and forth between the two versions. The key to our success would be convincing the switchers to stay on the new platform.
With oversight from volunteer profs and customer support, I mapped the timeline of an individual course. It revealed two key periods where we could make a big impact by addressing three crucial pain points:
I established a simple, repeatable process to share with the team.
1) Identify the next priority problem with the PM and Eng Manager.
2) Use solution sketches to present different solutions and assess scope and complexity.
3) Create a prototype to test with users and hand off to engineering.
Problem: Professors couldn't make changes to all grades simultaneously. Common use cases include dropping difficult assignments or grading on a curve.
Solution: Introduce a toolbar component for bulk changes.
Result: Hundreds of hours saved on manual changes, more users willing to switch
Adding a row of averages helped the professors track student performance across various assignments. But our diehard users were not going to switch without surfacing a more detailed analysis.
To address this group, I designed a report view allowing professors to "zoom in" on individual assignments and students. The new UI allowed us to incorporate more details and bulk editing features that made grading faster.
Once we launched the report views for questions and students, we saw a tremendous uptick in users switching to our new UX.
The data confirmed that the new gradebook had reached the level of sophistication and depth our users were looking for. Top Hat was able to formally deprecate the old gradebook and concentrate solely on the new platform.