Blackboard
Two-way Chat App: Research
Role: Researcher and design support
Team: 4 product designers, 1 project manager, 1 product owner, 1 content designer, 1 scrum team
Timeline: 8 months
Background
As technology and regulations around teacher/student communication evolves, K-12 schools are hungry for a tool that solves their need for two-way communication in a legal, ethical and simplified way. Blackboard was looking to fill that gap with a tool that easily integrated into its platform. The initial research, strategy and some design had begun before I was assigned this project. I supported our senior designer by managing the concept testing research, synthesis and readout, while also assisting with design and various workshops.
The Problem
How might we build a tool that enables two-way communication between teachers, parents, and students that also gives users control over their communication, and institutions the ability to track any interactions between users?
Initial Research
Because I was coming into a project already in progress I needed to get up to speed as quickly as possible. I reviewed the initial decks outlining goals and strategy, and reviewed the original design explorations.
My next steps were to complete a product audit of what was currently in the blackboard products pertaining to messaging and communication. This helped me to understand what existing designs we could leverage, and how we could create a product that aligned with Blackboard Ultra.
Drafting + User Flows
As a team we sat down to do some initial drafting of flows and visual designs to start to shake loose ideas. We quickly realized that we needed a better understanding of how users would move through the app, so we decided to shift to creating user flows.
Concept Testing
We took our findings from the collaborative design session and began building out low-fidelity designs for concept testing. Once our prototype was ready I worked with our senior designer to set up participants, write a research plan and build out our facilitator guide. Using Validately, we spoke with 13 participants, including administrators, students, teachers and parents.
View Research Plan
View Facilitator Guide
Research Objectives
Discover how school admins and teachers are currently communicating with parents and students
Understand user pain points and develop potential insights
Probe users on what permissions they expect for teachers, students, parents and admins
Discover what tools and workarounds schools are currently using, especially in connection with BBComms.
We broke our research into two sessions. The first session focused on speaking with administrators and students about what they needed and expected from a 2-way chat application. The second session focused on teachers who were also parents. This group had the experience of using various tools to communicate with their students day to day, while also understanding the other side as a parent.
Synthesis
After completing the concept testing sessions it was time to synthesize. Observations and statements were organized on virtual sticky notes and then paired together with similar information, identifying themes and patterns. With this information I created a research readout to share with all stakeholders, including design, dev and PM.
View Research Readout
The primary themes we identified were:
Current expectations around managing and using tools has overwhelmed users, making them apprehensive to adopting new ones.
People are hungry for tools that simplify workflows and maximize efficiency.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to permissions; it needs to be flexible.
Users take liability very seriously when it comes to providing a private and safe environment for students, parents, and staff.
Customization allows users to adapt their experience and gives them a sense of control.
Additional Steps: Naming Workshop
While our senior designer worked on refining the designs based on testing feedback, we also designed and led a naming workshop for the app. We have an ongoing issue at Blackboard wherein there is no formal process for naming new products. This process we designed is a series of design exercises that we facilitated with 5-10 stakeholders on a project. Participants are given rails to think creatively within and generate lots of name ideas. After the workshop, those names are taken by a smaller team of 1-3 people who perform additional research, refine the names and then present back to the larger group.