My Role
Lead Designer
UX / UI
Q/A
I took charge of everything from design, documentation, prototyping, to testing, excluding development. As with all projects under my guidance, I led the initial quality assurance process. Our primary goal for the homework help feature was to make sure students could easily get answers. We aimed to remove any hurdles, allowing students to ask questions immediately upon landing on the platform, whether they were using desktop or mobile.
Overview
In addition to the free tutoring service we provide students, we also heard that students wanted a way to ask academic related questions and homework questions to the community. In parallel we matched the homework categories to what we offered in tutoring.
Problems to solve
Provide a way for students to ask homework questions
Make categories in parallel with tutoring categories
The Interface
The main objective for homework help is receiving an answer. We tried to eliminate any roadblocks and get students asking questions right away by providing an open text area. Included was also a hint of how to format a question to get the best answer.
Mobile view
For mobile the UI looks slightly different but the functionality remains the same.
Ease of access
At the center of the bottom navigation students can access Homework Help at any time.
Adoption
This section included a joyride showing students how to ask a question and increase their chances of getting it answered.
Notifying students
As a second phase we rolled out notifications to students who said they could help (this was based on the subjects they selected when asked what they could help with — a part of our signup we dubbed Get Started)
Introducing Homework Help
When all students sign up on Plexuss they are onboarded with some welcome modals explaining and teaching what they can do on the platform. In reality a lot of students skipped these steps, but some students actually took the time to view them, we gained this insight by asking and watching hotjars.
What do students think of it?
Students had overwhelmingly positive things to say about Plexuss.
Challenges
#1 Database load
We wanted to add tagging subjects on the initial screen to keep things simple but development wise it was better situated as a second step. This was also tied to our tutoring categories as well so it was heavy on the db.
#2 Timely & relevant routing of questions
With a team distributed between multiple time zones (at the time) we needed a way to be notified of when an answer was submitted. We setup a method internally of which subjects/categories our team wanted to answer. Next we setup a zapier automation to notify a designated slack channel when new questions arrived and tagged only the relevant subject.
#3 Additional hurdles & technical debt
The project started smoothly, but as we were developing the feature, we got more requests from stakeholders to gather extra info from students and restrict their usage since it became quite popular. I believe that in the long run, adding more steps hurt the effectiveness of the project. Unfortunately, we had to shift our focus to other projects, so we couldn't keep fine-tuning and improving the experience.
©2024 - Nic Nuyten
Walnut Creek, CA