Category /
Product Design
Reading Rocket is an educational platform that leverages AI to assist teachers in conducting short-form reading assessments for students ages 5-8, empowering them to spend more time teaching and less time setting up and reviewing assessments using traditional methods.
The platform combines this powerful assessment tool with a Read feature which engages young readers through traditional and generative content tailored to their interests, crafted to spark a love of reading while simultaneously developing and exercising critical decoding skills.
Business Goals
Discover users' needs and behaviors, particularly with regard to how educators conduct reading assessments
Design a human-centered, approachable product for a diverse user base with minimal training requirements for users
Understand how Reading Rocket can integrate into classrooms and teachers' existing workflows
Project Scope and Deliverables
Educator User Persona
Conduct research to discover and define the behaviors and needs of Reading Rocket's educator users, synthesized as a user persona.
Assess Feature Prototype.
Design and test a clickable, AWS Amplify-optimized Figma prototype demonstrating how a user creates, assigns, and reviews a short-form reading assessment.
Storyboards
Use storyboards to illustrate how Reading Rocket's short-form assessment feature can be used in a classroom setting.
User Interviews
Interview objectives
To discover how teachers are currently conducting reading assessments
To find out what challenges teachers are facing when conducting reading assessments
To understand what technology is available in the classroom and what technology is being used during reading assessments
To learn what metrics are being measured after conducting reading assessments
Participants:
8 early childhood educators with a wide range of professional experience
Key Insights
Our users prefer to use pen and paper to take down notes during reading assessments
Our users do not use a lot of technology in the classroom
Time constraints and interruptions are the biggest challenges for our users
Students are grouped based off of initial, formal assessments, as well as focus areas they're struggling in
There are many methods used to keep students engaged
How Might We?
Help Tina quickly create and conduct a short-form reading assessment, specific to the student’s needs?
Design a solution that supports Tina’s current methods of conducting reading assessments while also expediting the assessment process?
Create a user-friendly interface that displays the student’s reading assessment results in a way that’s helpful, as well as easy for Tina to comprehend?
Design Principles
Simplicity
Keep the user interface clean and intuitive, ensuring that educators like Tina can easily navigate the application without unnecessary complexity. Use clear and concise language, minimizing cognitive load and making tasks straightforward to accomplish.
Accessibility
Ensure that the application is accessible to a diverse range of users, considering factors such as font size and color contrast. This ensures that educators like Tina can effectively use the application regardless of their specific needs.
Efficiency
Streamline the workflow by minimizing the number of steps required to complete common tasks. Provide shortcuts, automation features, and efficient data entry options to save time and reduce repetitive actions.
Data Analysis and Insights
Provide tools for analyzing student progress, identifying areas for improvement, and generating actionable insights. Visualizations, data dashboards, and reports can assist Tina in understanding student performance trends and making informed instructional decisions.
Testing
The team conducted monitored usability testing over Zoom, also utilizing Maze to help us record metrics. Users were instructed to create and assign a reading assessment, then review the assessment results.
Results
Users found the flows intuitive overallUsers had difficulty finding the button to create and assign a new assessmentThe "Reviewed" button on the analysis page was often overlooked
Conclusion
We incorporated user feedback into our next iteration, the high fidelity Figma prototype. The flows remained largely unchanged, with greater visibility and better positioning of the "Assess" button being the primary update.
Next Steps
Based on user feedback, we'd also like to explore adding printable study material and certificates of achievement to the platform, as well as work with a SME to refine and finalize metrics, student groupings, and overall UX copy.
