Ellevation Professional Learning

Project Summary

The Professional Learning feature is an extension of the Ellevation Instructional Strategies product, designed to enhance educators' skills through a series of professional learning courses. This feature leverages existing Ellevation data and tools, integrating them with a curated selection of instructional content from leading specialists in English Learner (EL) education. Through these courses, educators can deepen their understanding and improve their instructional practices, ensuring they are well-equipped to support English Learners effectively.

My Role

As the Design Lead, I collaborated closely with the product manager, lead engineer, and representatives from Educational Solutions, sales, and the Product Support team to develop an MVP of the teacher learning portal.

Process

Competative Analysis

Collaborated with the product, sales, and instruction specialists to identify key competitors, evaluate their offerings, and pinpoint opportunities for Ellevation to disrupt the current English Language Learner (ELL) professional development space.

Competative analysis deck

User Research and Discovery

Led a week-long design sprint to explore opportunities for the existing Instructional Strategies product. This included ideation, rapid prototyping, and creating a user testing script. Conducted internal and external interviews to identify user needs and pain points, performed a comprehensive audit of user management tasks and workflows.

Design sprint artifacts

Design sprint artifacts

Defining personas and their roles in districts

During design sprint and with subsequent user interviews we defined three key personas who would engage with the portal - Learners (Teachers), Coaches (Specialists, Coaches, Directors), Accountability Managers (District Admins, Principals).

Learner' Needs:

  • Require a quick, guided experience to apply Instructional Strategies resources in their classrooms due to limited time and overwhelming responsibilities.
  • Need incentives to engage in learning new skills, as many districts offer professional learning programs that provide credit hours and small rewards.

Coaches' Responsibilities:

  • Selecting and recommending courses to learners.
  • Monitoring and promoting learners' progress.
  • Reviewing results and engaging with learners in discussions.
  • Approving or recommending rewards.

Accountability Managers' Responsibilities:

  • Approving professional development(PD) courses for their districts.
  • Reviewing results through reports.

Based on user interviews, stakeholder discussions, and company business requirements, our team decided to prioritize improving the Learner's experience first. Subsequently, we will integrate workflows for Coaches and Accountability Managers, potentially utilizing other areas of the application such as the User Management page.

Persona docs

Design Strategy and Project Management

Contributed to finalizing project goals while championing user experience. I led continuous UX and product onboarding for new team members, and collaborated closely with the tech lead and product manager to understand technical and business constraints. Additionally, I worked with the sales and product support teams to create a fully functional prototype, successfully recruiting over 20 districts for the pilot phase.

Technical/Product Constraints:

  • New Professional Learning pages were build from the scratch while introducing new framework to Ellevation product suite
  • Requirement to use and contribute to brand new and fairly incomplete design system.

Educational Solutions Department Needs:

At the project's outset, we lacked readily available content. However, through close collaboration with the Educational Solutions Department and the Engineering lead, we developed a list of requirements to construct a flexible, modular course template. This template encompassed:

  • Unlimited amount of steps, to enable content creators add and remove sections from the learning modules
  • Requirement to use and contribute to brand new and fairly incomplete design system.

UX/Product Design

Ideated and sketched long-term solutions, defined task flows based on different personas' needs, and broke down designs into phases to support rapid development cycles. I created both high and low fidelity prototypes, conducted usability tests, and promoted the new Ellevation design system.

User flows based on Learner' Persona

Sketches of the Learner's Experince

Prototype Walkthrough