Assignment Builder
As part of the product team at Newsela, a content and assessment platform for K-12, I helped redesign an important part of the teacher workflow: creating an assignment.
The team rolled out new features in a split A/B test to learn from usage data. As UX research lead, I led interviews to compliment the quantitative data with qualitative insights. Collaborators included product managers and data analysts.
Project Type: UX Research
Role: Sr. UX Researcher
Organization: Newsela
Timeline: 2 months (2023)
Team Size: 4 members
The control group (80% of users) saw the current assignment builder
The experiment group (20% of users) saw the new assignment builder
Background
From past research and data, we knew that teachers were missing key assignment features and were using off-platform workarounds to meet their needs.
So the product team prototyped a set of new features (e.g. ability to lock reading levels, set start/due dates, assign specific activities).
We wanted to see which features brought the most value to teacher users, and consequently, the most value to the company.
Deliverables & Impact
Bi-weekly interview summaries
I led interviews with 20 teacher users to shed light onto what (and why) certain features were performing well, helping our team prioritize what to refine and deploy in a full-scale release.
After each set of interviews, I produced summaries to maintain stakeholder engagement. It included an average rating usability and usefulness for each feature, what was/wasn’t working well, and actionable recommendations.
Final summary for MVP and beyond
After all features had been tested over the course of 2 months, I produced a final summary outlining the takeaways from each feature, as well as short- and long-term recommendations.
The learnings from this study provided the validation needed to roll out critical features for Back-to-School. As hypothesized, teachers were making assignments on the platform more than before given their new set of features.
Challenge
Leading research in a time crunch
With mounting pressure from executive leadership to launch in time for Back-to-School, the product team was moving fast to launch an MVP.
To get ahead of this challenge, I created a testing schedule to work in lock-step with my product counterparts that were releasing features to the experiment group on a biweekly basis. This involved:
Product Managers and Data Analyst reviewed Heap data to identify areas for inquiry in the interviews.
I conducted interviews based on the feature release schedule, with team members observing.
I led weekly meetings to review quant and qual findings, address any critical action items, and prioritize what features to refine.
The UXR timeline weaves in user testing and check-ins over the course of two months.