In February 2020, I was asked to go on a journey with a feature in Balance that would change the way teachers plan lessons entirely. I knew it was going to be a challenge with many problems to solve.
The planning tool within Balance took over a year to design and develop. It was the longest project I’ve worked on, but that being said, it has been a wonderful journey of research, analysis, test, iterate and validate.
I knew there would be a lot of pit falls with this project due to the complexity of the challenge and with so many stakeholders onboard, I needed to clarify the vision.
Planning is split into three parts, long, medium and short term planning. I will begin designing long with a view to releasing to the users, shortly followed soon after with medium and then short term planning. As this was such a long project, I’ve tried to capture a few of the main highlights in this case study.
I had to design a drag and drop system that would allow users to take a module, sub-module or an objective and drop them into, firstly, long term containers if you like. We needed to take into account a number of factors, for example:
Long term challenges
Medium term challenges:
Medium term plans are weekly plans that teachers make currently in programs like ‘Word’. They essentially are bespoke plans like ‘Three little pigs - English’. They will often contain cross-curricula objectives as well as teacher's personal notes and resources.
Short term challenges:
Short term planning works a little differently than long and medium planning. Essentially it’s a calendar view 📆 that allow users to split up their bespoke medium term plans into days, so the teacher knows exactly what they are to teach for that day.
As this project started early 2020, I was able to attend our monthly Balance huddles, which would consist of local Balance users, who would come together to find out how to utilise the software. This was always a perfect opportunity for user feedback, via qualitative methods including interviews, post-it note exercises and general discussions.
To begin with, I really wanted to collect some data from the teachers and see what they would find beneficial from a planning tool. We did a simple post it note exercise and then asked the users to add sticky dots to the ideas that they liked the most. The results really helped give direction of what to include.
After the user needs were highlighted, I compiled the data into a list of most requested features and ‘how might we’ questions.
Problems (how might we…)
Target Audience
Anyone from young, newly qualified teachers, through to more mature teachers, heads and school governors.
Solution:
Based on user feedback, I will create a modern and interactive, three staged (long, medium and short term), drag and drop system that contains the below most requested features.
MUP Features:
Based on survey results as well as product requirements from stakeholders, the following features will be of primary focus:
Using lean UX research methodology, I created an ‘assumption’ based persona to validate at a later date. We already have some proto personas for Balance users, the one shown here was the closest match based off the users that attended the Balance Hub and provided feedback on this planning tool. This persona is our best guess for now, as to who will be using this tool and why.
Conclusion
Even from these rough sketches, it’s interesting to gain knowledge from our assumptions. Some of the main points raised were:
Testing these hypotheses
I wanted to simply lay the users root goal out for creating a long term plan and generating a report to see if I could identify any steps that could be reduced or improved.
Conclusion: Viewing the above process made me question the need to select ‘planning’ (step 1) and then select the long term planning section (step 2). If we could build these options directly into the new navigation then this would help the user toggle quicker between long, medium and short term plans.
I wonder if step 8, publishing the finalised plan, could be an automatic process once all the curriculum has been assigned to the various terms (step 5 - 6). This function allows subjects to be visible at medium term level, so it could be a nice time-saver.
We also asked teachers to return to the second huddle with copies of their medium term plans so we could analyse them. We compiled a list of questions including:
Using all the qualitative data from the discover stage of this project, I created piles of sketches and drawn prototypes. Some of the early, wipe board sketches are shown below.
I really wanted to start by concentrating on the component that would allow the user to take curriculum and essentially place it inside another component, via either drag and drop or some type of mass copy.
Before getting ahead of myself I knew that I needed to take a step back and look at some competitor analysis on how current drag and drop, copying, multi-selecting and tagging systems work. I compiled moods boards of all my findings.
I began working up some initial low fidelity wireframes which I could present back to the users.
I purposely left out all the intricacies and just concentrated on the over function as defined in my long term task analysis goal.
The ultimate goal from producing these low fidelity wire frames was to obtain some answers to the following ‘How might we’ sentences:
Second Balance Huddle
When we looked through all the feedback after the session we had a clearer picture of the next steps and what we needed to include. Below are just a few features I needed to think about:
At the second user feedback session we went through the low fidelity wireframes above and a few other medium fidelity wireframes that I had began creating. We also had the users answer the questionnaire mentioned earlier.
Using simple post it note exercises we gathered qualitative data that was paramount to the direction of the planning tool.
With all the research we’d performed over the two huddles, I began sketching and prototyping the curriculum component in more detail. Concentrating on long term planning, I worked up the below prototypes.
I wanted the modules to appear as parent cards to the sub-module and objective cards that would show when expanded.
Curriculum component (displaying modules)
I wanted to create simple tags that would show what terms the objective had been assigned to. I created a page in admin that allowed the user to enter titles and dates for each term with a short code description that again was customisable in the admin section.
I knew from the research that some modules had a lot of objectives contained within them, so I wanted to include a ‘close module’ option just to help make this component super easy and quick to navigate.
One of the problem statements created was about allowing users to split the curriculum up for each subject throughout the year. I knew that as well as including tags on the cards I needed something else to allow users to see the curriculum which they had left to assign.
To solve this I created ‘All’, ‘Assigned’ and ‘Unassigned’ tabs running across the top of the component. The idea being that the user could go to the ‘Unassigned’ tab and divi out the remaining curriculum. As it is assigned to a term it would then appear within the ‘Assigned’ section.
Curriculum component (All, assigned and unassigned)
It was great to test this out on users and see them actively selecting this tab after working on their curriculum.
I decided that I wanted the user to know if a module still had unassigned objectives contained within it. I create icons so the user knew if modules still had unassigned objectives within them.
For the right side drop zone component, I had the term tabs running up the side as we would utilise this space to house another tab for potentially deleted term blocks labelled 'Holding area', which would save any objectives from potentially deleted weeks.
Term component - displaying objectives
Once a module or sub-module is copied over, it would split out into objectives, as it’s the objectives that are taught. I kept a breadcrumb of the parent module and sub-module on each child objective via the chevron. I also included a ‘show/hide all’ function at the top right of the component to help view this information more efficiently.
I included a three dot menu that would bring up further options for each term or week block. In medium planning I would use this area to access the ‘notes’ and to mark a week as ‘inactive’.
Term component - further options
When an assigned objective is selected via the checkboxes a bottom draw appears to allow the user to mass copy or delete any of the assigned objectives to other terms or weeks.
I was really happy how the page came together with these components sat side by side.
There is so much more to tell here but to keep it brief, I added extra features that allowed the user to expand the right hand component
The final page layout
so it was full width, as well as a ‘distraction free’ mode which removed the header element from the page and increased the height of both the left and right components. This was particularly useful when adding notes.
From steps 2 and 3 of the task analysis, I knew that we needed to create an initial landing page for allowing the user to select a chosen subject. I created the below page that listed all the subjects. We displayed relevant information on national curriculum years and published and edited dates.
Landing page
We included a publish plan button so that once an SLT had completed their long term plans they could make them visible for teachers to view as I realised early on that we would only want the plan visible for medium term planning once the SLT had finalised the plan.
Since lock down began, we found as a company, using Mino to post visuals was a really good way for key stakeholders to provide feedback. Although we do use the comments functionality within Figma with certain stakeholders, Mino offers an instantly visible collection of feedback - simple!
Stakeholder feedback
I took lots of feedback over a two week review period and iterated the designs until the final prototypes provided all the necessary filters and options to allow this tool to cater for many different scenarios. It was so pleasing to see the results of months of research and prototyping come to fruition.
After we released long and medium term planning, short term was being developed behind the scenes for a later release. We knew from the feedback sessions that not all users used daily calendars but we wanted this tool to cater for all users so it was important to be able to allow for this.
Short term planning
The idea behind the below page was that the user could take the objectives from all their medium term plans and drop them on to a daily calendar, producing a pdf report calendar. We built in the ability to allow new learning events to be created from this page, something that teachers had asked for in the discovery sessions.
Even though we knew that 80% of Balance users used a desktop device, we didn’t think this should influence the tool working on responsive devices. There is a large argument that users predominantly use desktop devices because certain features within Balance are not available on responsive devices.
I wanted to simplify the process for responsive which was a difficult task due to the intricacies of the tool. My earlier designs included drag and drop for responsive, similar to that on the Trello mobile app. I was asked to simplify this though by major stakeholders for phase 1, and instead introduce the drag and drop feature after we reviewed the data on how planning is being used. For now, responsive relies on the checkboxes, to assign objectives out to terms, weeks and days.
It took months to sketch, prototype and iterate the tool to work responsively. I didn’t want to see it as a secondary task. Having this tool work on all devices was a must.
“Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to a bare minimum.”
Steve Krug (Don't make me think)
Responsive
I’ve only really given a small glimpse into the tool and features in this case study. It’s been the longest project I’ve had the privilege to work on and one that I’ll never forgot. Some of the highlights have definitely been the user feedback sessions and basing the designs around the data collected while trying to still adhere to the requests of the stakeholders.
Like any project of this scale, it will always remain under review. We will be watching recordings via Hot Jar and sending online questionnaires out to users. Watch this space!
