UI/UX DESIGNER, APRIL–SEPTEMBER 2013

In April 2014, I moved to Reykjavik, Iceland for 6 month to join the team of InfoMentor as UI/UX Designer on developing InfoMentor Home, a new way that will allow parents, teachers and pupils to communicate and support learning. Using this product parents can easily see where their child is in their learning and what strategies have been outlined by the teacher to help them progress. Besides working on InfoMentor Home, I was partly designated to maintain and improve the already existing InfoMentor web platform.

This page is still a work in progress

About InfoMentor Home

InfoMentor is a leading provider of teaching and learning solutions, that brings together in one platform the most important stakeholders – the pupil, the parents and the teacher. InfoMentor is used by more than half a million teachers and pupils in the UK, Sweden, Iceland, Switzerland, Germany and Italy.

InfoMentor Home allows parents, teachers and pupils to communicate and support learning. Parents can easily see where their child is in their learning and what strategies have been outlined by the teacher to help them progress. This is an invaluable asset for schools as it not only promotes self-directed learning amongst its pupils, but it also fulfils the Ofsted requirement to easily inform parents of their children’s progress.

Tasks and Problems

April, 2013 – As I've joined the InfoMentor team I've been designated to be in charge of creating the first wireframes, page layouts, flow diagrams, reasearch plan, and high-fidelity prototypes for remote user testing.

The main challenge was to create a simple and easy-to-use platform that holds the bare minimum amount of feature for a wide range of ages audience, that includes pupils, teachers and parents. The second problem was to make sure that the platform layout, flow and structure can be easily scaled and modified for the future releases.

Tools

Sketch App, InVision, Jira, HipChat.

Process

We all know how hard it can be catching your child’s teacher in the playground. Now put this in the perspective of teaching and learning. Our team had a goal to make the platofom engaging, user friendly pupil and parent interface.

As each type of user has specific needs and learning curves I wrote imaginary-but-realistic stories that intersected all in the context of a teacher-pupil-parent experience. Written in direct collaboration with user researchers, persona stories widened our vision dramatically as we could see many other opportunities we had not imagined before.

Working closely with a product manager and the stakeholders, I constructed a design-driven product vision picturing the main aspects of platform, which were: effective communication between teacher, child and parent, viewing timetables and homework, understanding the school’s curriculum and units of learning, sharing news, and sending messages.

The actions required to perform all the tasks mentioned were complicated to be easily undersood by everyone.  Along with an extensive competitive research, I looked at how the similar problems are being solved in similar solutions and how teachers operate in the real world. Accordingly, I designed a simple system for teachers and parents to maximize their needs and simplify their workflow. Observing humans and their reactions to the learning process, especially in diverse environments, I made my first try that enabled its pupils to love and enjoy learning sessions to their workflow, react and engage with teachers or unitedly as well as growing their knowledge according to the curriculum.