Context
Skyeng and Skysmart provide a teacher portal where educators can manage their work — scheduling lessons, setting availability, preparing for classes, checking student homework, and taking professional development courses.
Design Lead • Spring 2023 • Skyeng.ru
The Problem: Teachers Spend Too Much Time on Inefficient Tasks
From teacher research, we know teachers spend too much time on administration tasks like preparing for a lesson and administrating students. For each 50-minute lesson, the teacher has to spend 30 minutes preparing for a lesson and checking students’ homework and 20 minutes managing the schedule each day.
Based on our interview findings, we mapped out a “Teacher working cycle journey” that shows how much time teachers spend on each step and how these steps help them achieve their goals: delivering inspiring lessons and increasing their income.
After learning teachers’ needs and insights from the “Teacher working cycle journey,” we came up with 3 main challenges that we have to solve
- Simplicity: How can we simplify navigation?
- Focus: How can we help teachers focus on important tasks?
- Feelings: What can make the product feel less like a tool and more like a partner?
The first step: generate and validate ideas
To begin, we needed to generate as many ideas as possible. We assembled a small team of four designers, and each one began brainstorming and sketching their concepts.
Through discussing these ideas together, we developed the core principles that would guide our designs.
Solution
Home Screen: Feed as the Central Element
To help teachers focus on essential tasks, we designed a lesson card feed as the central feature of the teacher portal. The main navigation remains on the left side, while the right side displays the teacher’s KPIs, income, status updates, and news.
Our goal was to create a dynamic card that adapts to each step of the “Teacher working cycle journey” and provides teachers with all necessary information and actions. Based on time and context, the card displays information about:
- lesson time and duration
- student information
- next lesson’s topic
- previous lesson details (homework and essays)
- key actions (such as “Join lesson”)
If a student has an unchecked essay or writing task, it will be highlighted when the lesson is scheduled for today.
5 min before a lesson there the only one button is active “Join the lesson”.
If the lesson started there, the same “Join the lesson” button with an active time progress
The card for next day’s lessons displays only the time, student information, and lesson topic.
For lessons scheduled more than one day in advance, the card collapses to a compact state showing only the time and student information
The navigation menu
Based on quantitative data and teacher feedback, we removed unnecessary menu items and added more contrast. This helps make navigation through the menu easier and provides space for future growth.
Personalization: Creating an Emotional Connection
To show that the teachers’ portal is more than just a task management tool, we added fun and personalized elements to create a more engaging experience that teachers can connect with emotionally.
We created a dynamic headline that changes based on the time of day and number of remaining lessons
When all lessons for the day are finished, a card displays the day’s statistics along with engaging headlines
Results and Impact
Based on UX interviews, we addressed all problems and time-wasting activities for teachers.
The team is continuously refining and improving the new teachers’ portal design based on teacher feedback and quantitative data.