Study Island for Home

Other Contributors:

Jessica Loredo (Illustrations); the Education City design team (Illustrations)

Study Island for Home was my first opportunity to lead the UX direction of a product from start to finish. It went through a lot of transformations and iterations along the way.

Study Island is a K-12 online test prep and practice solution. The initial concept for the “home” version was actually a classroom version – one that could be sold at a lower price point to individual teachers rather than to districts as a whole. The first mockups were really geared towards that idea, and I took initiative to arrange my own usability tests of the teacher interface with some colleagues of my father, who worked at a middle school. They gave some very valuable insights and we made changes based on their feedback.

The product team then did further market research & focus groups, using my mockups as visuals where needed. Based on what they found, we pivoted to focusing this product as more of a home practice solution for parents. We held multiple ideation sessions internally and I presented competitor research and my relevant findings from the usability tests to kick some of those off. Based on our ideation sessions, we made significant changes to the initial mockups. The new mockups for the student side included clip art to give an idea to stakeholders of a general art direction we could go in; we found it was much easier for our internal team to react to things if they had some visual component to them, as long as we were very clear that this was only a placeholder.

Once we felt that we had a good foundation for the student side, some of my teammates (in particular, Jessica Loredo & the whole Education City team) began working on artwork/illustrations. While they worked away on that, I partnered with our director John Bowie to write the scripts for some formal usability testing with students. I also created an interactive prototype using Axure that we could use.

For the testing, we recruited twelve students ranging from ages eight to eighteen. I facilitated the usability testing, while various internal stakeholders watched from behind a two-way mirror. Some students had their parents present, as well, so we were able to ask them questions on the fly if there was time at the end.

I made one final presentation of findings from these tests, and we updated the prototype before handing it off to the developers. I worked closely with them to tweak visuals as needed and collaborate on layouts that needed to change based on technical limitations.

I also made a list of recommendations based on our research findings for future enhancements to the product after the MVP was released. Unfortunately, Study Island for Home did not perform as expected and therefore has not had any major changes since its launch. The belief is that this was due to an overestimation of the market need for another product of this kind.

I learned a lot during this project, and consider it to be a fundamental building block in my career path. It solidified my love of usability testing and user research in general, and taught me a lot about how to transform findings into actionable changes.

Student Mockups & Screenshots

Parent Mockups & Screenshots