Improving Quality of Life
Supporting early childhood educators to deliver more joyful, meaningful teaching experiences by enhancing Lillio’s Weekly Planner
ORGANIZATION
Lillio
RELEASE
July 2024
SKILLS
User Research
Design Strategy
UX and UI Design
Enhancing the learning experience, one block at a time.
Teaching Process
Educators go through a lot of effort to put together lesson plans that are developmentally appropriate and effective for their students. There are so many steps involved and many more factors considered. Below is just a simplification of the process:
Review requirements and overall child development
Research appropriate activities
Organize into a plan
Prepare materials
Perform activities in the classroom
Observe and take notes as well as photos while teaching
Record observations
Assess child development
Rinse and repeat
The Weekly Planner aims to assist educators from steps two to four. We released the second version of the planner during the back-to-school season in 2023. It’s a beautiful enhancement of the original version, however, it missed a few marks in terms of addressing fundamental improvements. At the core, it’s still the same old planner.
Despite numerous improvements in the second version, the planning experience remains largely the same as the original.
Redefining the Workflow
I joined the team and started working on the next iteration just before launching the second version. We released it as a beta program to gather feedback from early adopters, which clearly showed key user experience issues in the workflow.
It’s not flexible and the process feels disjointed. Overall it’s not a good representation of how educators plan their lessons.
I started redefining the workflow based on the findings. Working directly with the product manager and the lead engineer helped us align on scope early on. We also created a glossary of terms unique to the teaching experience, which we later verified with our in-house experts.
In this updated flow, educators are given the options to plan however they want it. The question now is, how might we provide flexibility while maintaining the simplicity of the previous planner?
Designing Perceived Simplicity
With a tight timeline, I explored two concepts: an incremental improvement and a more significant departure from the existing version. I listed the pros and cons between concepts and despite the added complexity of the second option, it was quite obvious that it very much addresses the problems of the newly released planner.
Visualizing concepts as wireframes help communicate ideas without getting bogged down by details.
I then broke down the concept into two explorations: template and planner. I went through several iterations with the team, involving both synchronous working sessions and asynchronous feedback which involves screen recordings and sticky notes in Miro. We eventually settled on options that were deemed usable, viable, and feasible.
Using notes, stickers and emojis provide an extra layer of fun and communication.
At this point, we have better scope definition so I collaborated with the product manager to create a story map and narrow it down further – ultimately defining the MVP version of the new Weekly Planner. It was an effective exercise in attrition and alignment. We concluded the exploration stage with better team alignment and confidence.
Story mapping helped us prioritize which features are fundamental to enhancing the teaching experience.
Finding Opportunities for Feedback
We didn’t have a budget for running user research studies so I relied on my team, our in-house experts (ex-educators, curriculum developers, etc.) and the rest of the design team for feedback.
We did have an opportunity to gather user feedback at an event the company was participating in – the annual NAEYC conference. Thousands of educators from all over the world congregate to learn about the latest advancements in the field and to connect with one another.
Every prototype I build follows a story – there’s always a beginning, middle and end. Typically I start off with a storyboard, which I use as a guide throughout my process. I polished off the wireframes and filled in the rest of the sequence before moving into Figma for prototyping.
A simple storyboard goes a long way!
At the booth, we set up tablets that any attendee can pick up and use. The prototype had to be robust as it was self-guided. Feedback was captured casually and funnelled through Slack. It wasn’t the most ideal scenario but sometimes you just have to work with what you have.
It was well received with most of the feedback praising the drag and drop capabilities. Combining user insights from the beta program with feedback from the prototype add up to these themes.
Flexibility is key to successful lesson planning and teaching
Putting it all Together
At this point, we have a well defined scope plus high confidence in the solution so it was time to move into visual design in Figma. I used the prototype as the foundation and divided my exploration into smaller sections, with each one having multiple options that I presented to the product and design teams for critique. To move faster, I focused on the tablet experience since that’s the primary view for lesson planning in Lillio.
This complex workflow is accompanied by design walkthroughs with the team.
I also created a separate page for visualizing user workflows since lesson planning is no longer a linear process – a key improvement in supporting the educator’s needs. Each section in the workflow page is mapped to an epic on Jira and linked directly to corresponding tickets. The team regarded it as the source of truth for design.
To ensure consistency and also for me not to double up the work, I created local components that were shared across the exploration, workflow and spec pages. The screens alone cover both web and native apps plus the different states associated with each view. It was a lot of ground to cover but ultimately I shipped all design requirements.
The Weekly Planner V3 launched just in time for the next back-to-school!
Final Thoughts
The project involved a healthy balance between design, development, and project management, ensuring we avoided past mistakes and stayed aligned with our objectives. Despite team members transitioning away, we shipped the New Weekly Planner just in time for the next back-to-school season. The result was a flexible, user-friendly tool that significantly improved the planning process for educators so they could focus on what they enjoy the most – teaching!