Russell Jack

The Pain:

Mastery Connect Student Experience (Bubblesheet) sucks. Specifically, students are hitting "Submit" early, and not completing the whole assessment. This requires support and dev effort to reopen the assessment, so the student can complete it.

"Before" workflow:

The reported issue is that students see the "Submit" button, and think it's to submit just this question. The confirmation modal is then too wordy and confusing for an 8-year old, so they just click "Submit."

Hot Fix #1 - Button Text

First thought was to change the button to say "Finished." We also wireframed up some concepts making the modal confirmation more kid-friendly. We liked the modal concept but didn't implement it for some reason.

The button text change did nothing to stop the number of support tickets. We realized at some point we would need to overhaul this whole interface, but we needed to stop the immediate bleeding.

Hot Fix #2 - Admin Reopen

We decided to allow school admins to re-open assessments, so they wouldn't need to call dev or support. A quick link in our interface made this possible.

This fixed the issue for support instantly. But we still knew we hadn't fixed the real problem.

Design Overhaul #1 - User Testing with Kids!

We mocked up a new version to address the button issue. We also rebranded from "Bubblesheet" to "MC Student."

We did a formalized UX study with these comps. We pulled about 10 kids (employee's children) into the office. The ages ranged from 6 to 17. We walked them through two types of assessments, and observed their interactions. UX studies are fascinating because people interact with your product in ways you never expect.

UX Findings

• Insead of submitting early, students weren't able to find the "submit" button. We retooled the "next" button interaction to reveal that button on the last question.
• Students had a difficult time knowing which question they were on. We retooled this interaction by being more picky in showing the row we were currently on.
• Students had a hard time understanding their results. They thought the mastery status was a button. We fixed this by making the status look less like a button, and giving a more obvious button to click to be done.
• Students didn't like the gray, thought it was boring and unengaging, didn't entice them to explore the interface. We added some color in the next version.
• Students needed more feedback that they had completed an action. We made the checkmark bigger and bolder, and made it appear upon click, instead of clicking "next."
• (Interesting observation) Students on iPads would scroll instead of using "next/prev." Students on laptops used the buttons and didn't scroll.

Updated Designs

Here's the mocks for the finalized design:

We launched with these mocks and have received no complaints so far through all the beginning-of-year testing (yay).

V2.0 and Beyond

We still have an ongoing roadmap for this MC Student experience feature. Many state assessment programs use 3rd party businesses for end of year summative tests. We've begun researching the design patterns these interfaces use. We plan to pattern V2.0 after these. Hopefully when students see that interface, they feel a sense of orientation having used our product.