IXL LEARNING
Case Study
RESEARCH GOAL
OBJECTIVE
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Cache Consignment is engaged in the marketing and sale of luxury designer items, jewelry, and watches. During alpha phase, the business wanted to evaluate a clear value proposition, gain user insight, and refine the user flow.
IXL.com is the world's most popular subsciption-based learning site for K-12 with over 10 million users. IXL provides unlimited practice problems with meaningful, up-to-date tracking on your child's progress. A student can learn thousands of K-12 topics online, get detailed feedback and guidance. It also offers Win fun awards! Real-Time Diagnostic. Skill Recommendations. Ad Free.
PROJECT SCOPE
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​A better understanding of their admin feature's ease of use.
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DELIVERABLES
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What are notable behaviours, preference, barriers and technologies that impact usage of the admin account?
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Identify needs and opportunities to inform the product design strategy.
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Observe and understand users current editing processess.
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MY ROLE
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User Researcher
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Where were we in the Product Dev. Phase?
Discover
Design
Develop
METHODOLOGY
5-week field study to assess the effectiveness of IXL's admin account offerings as participants used them in their natural enviornment. Study participants were located acorss the United States.
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Phase 1: Conduct user surveys for target demographic.
Phase 2. 30- minute contextual interviews with 50 users.
Phase 3: 3 weeks of task based remote testing.
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS
Exploration and deep dive was conducted for companies in the same industry sector or market niche who compete with this company's product and services.
RECRUITING
Demographic: Users who accesss the account 2 +/ week. Also access account on mobile
Gender: 50/50
Ethnicity: Mix
Devices: Mobile (iPad and Android devices) and Web browser
RECRUITING
Gauge user emotions and feedback towards current management program using survey creator Typeform.
FEEDBACK
"Every program we use allows us to modify our enrollment at any time, why can't yours?
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"The lower proce point for this product is not worth the hassle it brings to our district and schools."
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"We should be able to manage this on our end entirely and have ownership of our data."
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HEAT MAPPING
Heatmapping tool CrazyEgg, was used to moderate participants who were instructed to perfrom the task to add, edit, remove, and reactivate student accounts. Results indicate that a large number of users did not reconize the call-to-action links and buttons in the existing design.
HEURISTIC EVALUATION
Heuristic evaluation was performed to compare and better understand the usability gaps in the existing admin portal. The team agreed the UI should assiste user in recongnizing preexisting patterns rather than recalling information.
GUIDING PRINCIPLES
PROVISIONAL PERSONAS
USER VALIDATION
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Enrollment management process should be as easy and quick, preferrably automated.
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District management features should include full range of capabilities to adjust or edit enrollment.
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User flow should be streamlined so users do not need to contact customer support for small matters.
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USER VALIDATION
AFFINITY MAP
Recording all observations, an affinity map was created to visualize users concerns and needs.
USER JOURNEY
A user journey map was crafted to tell the story of the customer's experience: from initial contact, through the process of engagement, and into a long-term partnership.
OVERALL THEMES AND OPPORTUNITIES
#1 Grant admin power user features
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Enable features that are available to ours customers service team to the users end. This will give users the ability to make changes without contacting the company.
#2 Use third party enrollment management
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Partner with a third party vendor that manages enrollment and secure SETP. This will alleviate the management tasks for our administrators and customer service team.
#2 Build auto rostering feature-in-house
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Create a similar process in house (similar to #2) to meet the demands of users. This will prevent the company from having to rely on a third party data manager.
NEXT STEP: A/B TESTING
The business decided to build the product in-house. 10%of users or three large districts composed of 50 admins with 100,000 affected users were selected as a sample group to test feature during the next enrollment cycle. Special instructions and regulations were given to these districts to track longitudinal success rates of automated secure FTP.
