revitalizing courseware

Pearson is the one of the largest provider of textbook based courseware on the market. While we have made leaps forwards in user experience with some of our lighter weight, more modern offerings, such as Revel, our older more widely adopted offerings, Mastering and Mylabs are old, difficult to use and feel like enterprise software. It was created with the instructor in mind, disregarding the student’s study habits and needs. We aimed to change that by collaborating with students directly.

My Role: Workshop facilitation, UX Direction, UX design

A quick workshop inspired by Ideo

The workshop plan was loosely based on an Ideo structured ideation workshop, and tailored specific to our needs and limitations. For several days, as a collective group of participants across UX, research and product, we reviewed research, and defined themes, How Might We statements and basic need finding to define how we could create an engaging learning experience for our students.

Workshop presentation

Storymapping

Ultimately we landed on designing a system, personalized to the student that would would have two distinct modes; homework and study. The student’s performance would define the topics they needed to study or master.

Codesign

We further validated our hypothesis by conducting a co design with students, which helped us validate our approach, made us consider other products as inspiration (such as exercise apps) and got us closer to a simple flow.

While conducting these interview and story map exercises with our participants, I sketched design in real time on an iPad.

The Design

While we still have work to do, we have defined a simple end to end flow that allows the user to reference content at any time, be alerted to topics they should focus on and create custom study guides. While the front end has simplified things for the user in order to be easy to use with UI that gets out of their way, the backend is a very complicated system.