In higher education, the online versions of college textbooks are known as courseware.
In 2017, Pearson began developing a new courseware platform destined to support over 2000 text book titles with integrated assignment building, assessments, and grading. I was tapped for my experience managing UX on REVEL, Pearson’s then-current generation courseware platform.
Five years of learning about our products through experience, user research, and customer input were considered when building toward a new courseware platform.
We started with an experience map — a journey-like view of customers’ interactions with our product. For each stage in the experience, we identified how past learning from our portfolio of products should inform this new one.
We created a series of definition statements across the three main user roles expected to exist in the software.
From these, we were able to derive focused “How might we?” questions to advance during ideation.
Based on what we learned during the discovery process, we felt it would be a high priority to improve the experience for creating new courses and assigning material within them over past products.
“How might we make customizing a course & then creating multiple classes of it easy?”
I conceptualized a new framework for how we presented the activities comprising course creation to the user. We iterated on this framework in the subsequent prototyping phase.
How might we…?
accommodate assigning content from hundreds of titles with a wide variety of media types?
give instructors a running tally of the work they’ve assigned their students?
ease navigation within a complex information hierarchy?
How might we…?
alert instructors when a student lags behind in mastering the current learning objective?
indicate when students are ready to test out of the current objective?
give meaningful feedback to the instructor about where and how students are advancing?
In a marketplace where premium products are subject to disruption by free alternatives, proving the efficacy of their products was key to Pearson’s strategy. Equipping instructors with timely feedback on student mastery of learning objectives was one way of implementing this strategy.
Moderated user testing in collaboration with our research team lead to insights that became useful in subsequent development of the product.