What is HMH Ed?
Ed is a digital education platform that helps teachers, students, and school administrators manage everything from in-class activities to school attendance and more.
Teacher's primarily use Ed to find and use lesson plans and in-class teaching material that align with their state and district curriculum standards.
Customer Driven Changes
In late 2023, I led design for improving the information architecture and navigation of the Ed platform. After reviewing recent interviews, survey data, and our own facebook page comments from Ed users, we found that the administrative and content heavy IA structure didn't align with many teachers' daily tasks.
Teachers expected to login and see a simple dashboard with information about the classes they were teaching for the day, week, or semester. Instead, they had to navigate through a series of information dense screens, sort through tons of licensed content, and create their own shortcuts to ultimately complete basic tasks such as viewing class attendance or grading online assessments.
Through lots of workshops, stakeholder feedback, and heavy collaboration with business and engineering teams across the company, we settled on a more playful look and feel. We utilized high contrast colors and simple card components to chunk information, orient the user within specific product areas, and reduce cognitive load when completing and switching between various tasks.
We added a temporary dashboard to the platform in early 2023 as an interim solution and started design and development for the new My Classes pages that would rollout throughout 2024.
Promising Customer Feedback
Early concept validation with customers proved that our proposed changes to the information architecture and visual design provided exactly what teachers had been asking for. The first round of usability testing showed an immediate increase in usability and intuitive navigation across the platform.
The Student Experience
As the platform architecture improved, so did the student experience. Students typically see a simplified view of the teacher experience but we made major strides to change that with the release of a few new student centered experiences like the Bookshelf section.
Here, students (at least the ones that can read) are able to choose independent reading books from a library of HMH licensed content based on difficulty levels and topics set by their teachers. The books are accessible both in school and at home through a simplified, tablet supported student experience.
The Admin Experience
As part of the Ed platform overhaul, we also gave a much needed facelift and slight architecture change to the admin rostering workflow. We leveraged our existing partnerships and integrations with some of the most common rostering platforms on the market in order to significantly cut down on the number of steps required for admin to simply setup and manage all the rostered students at their school(s).
Prior to the visual improvements to the rostering workflow, admin were required to follow an 8 step flow with sub sections at each step. The old experience was driven by uploading CSVs and making tons of manual selections from drop downs and tables.
We improved the process and decreased time spent on rostering related tasks dramatically by following a turbo tax model. We swapped out drop downs and multi-select tables for cards with logos and a smart dashboard with key metrics, improving both usability and visual appeal.
