DATE
July 2018
ROLE
Product Manager, Chief Academic Office, Developers
DESCRIPTION
A user interface project to add additional features to a product called exam reviews
Exam reviews so far had been focused on personalized content for every school and their classroom. Over time we realized this probably won't be a scalable project. So we started looking at alternatives to provide a platform that is almost as useful to students. Textbook exam reviews was an idea born out of that need to make exam reviews scalable for every single user on the platform.
Before: Old exam review layout
After: Updated exam review layout after adding textbook lists
Image: Some goals that I had planned for the textbook reviews based on different users
Since the last update on the exam reviews, we had done some more global changes including
- Design System w/ updated color scheme
- Updated Global Navigation
- Updated the multiple choice component
- Removed the ability to request an exam review
Image: An early sketch suggesting we show the exam review breakdown based on chapters included
Our goal now was to expand exam reviews from a smaller set of students from selected schools to everyone. This meant that making exam reviews based on textbook when no specialized course information was available.
The final mockup, which provides a default set of exam reviews based on the users textbook & the ability to upload their syllabus and have a exam review made for them.
Challenges
Aligning the content (academic) team with the research & findings that the highest value we bring users is with Exam Reviews.
To address this issue, I requested the Chief academic officer be a part of the interviewing process. This helped bring another person on the table who understood where the user problem lies and how subscribers having been using our service primarily for becoming exam ready.
Learnings
Another learning around communication, this time around cross teams. This project would have changed how the exam reviews were created in the content team, so having the Chief Academic Officer be a part of this process was a good step towards that.
The part that was missed is communicating these changes with people who are actually working on that content, since they are the primary folks executing this process. I definitely could have done a better job visualizing how the change would work from inside the system