Home Page Redesign
The problem
After conducting a platform wide NPS survey for the platform with approximately 2,000 respondents we found that, while the NPS had improved from previous years, Itslearning users found our platform “clunky”, “difficult to use” and “boring”. Comments like that were classified as “UI issues”. Having gained solid quantitative data telling us what our users were feeling, we wanted to set out to gather qualitative data on why they felt using platform was cumbersome.
A word cloud of the responses from the NPS survey I conducted in 2018
Conducting research
I spoke with approximately 80 teachers and students who were regular users of itslearning. Recruiting some participants from our internal user recruitment tool and using personal relationships I had with school administrators in the US I was able to set up several site visits in districts near Atlanta and Houston as well as virtual interviews with teachers around the country and in our European market.
After observing the teachers and students enter and use itslearning one thing stood out to us quickly: users were skipping the homepage and going directly into one of their courses. We had a home page set up where the school or district could leave updates and news about what is going on in the school.
We discovered that most schools were not updating this page regularly if at all. The home page had been an obstacle to what teachers and students actually wanted to do, which was enter a course and search for content. The only way for users to navigate to courses was by clicking on a menu item titled “Courses” and then choosing from a potentially long dropdown.
The old way for users to enter a course. They would have to click on a menu item and choose from the dropdown. It was not as straightforward and intuitive as it could have been
The design
Since the main task users were performing on the home page was finding a course we decided that needed to be as easy and intuitive as possible. We needed to redesign the home page to get students and teachers where they needed to go faster.
The first designs combined easier access to courses with aggregated information of what was going on in those courses. After presenting this to users it was clear putting all of this information on one page was overwhelming and made some information more difficult to find. Easy access to courses was still the highest priority so the other content was moved to a second tab.
A wireframe of the home page concept. Before colors and shadows were added.
Because of the comments we received about the design of itslearning being “boring” we wanted to make sure the colors were eye catching. Our visual designer come up with a new color palette specifically for the redesigned home page and we changed the usual grey background to a more striking purple.
The final visual design of the home page.
Reactions to the new home page upon release from users were positive. A user happiness survey conducted showed a happiness level of 78%, which is unusually high for our users. We also got a number of comments of how the distinct colors were a benefit for younger students as well as those with disabilities.
We listened to our users, found what would make their lives’ easier and created a better front door for our platform. We were successful because we kept engaging our users, getting their feedback and designing with creativity.
This was not the final chapter in improving our platform’s usability but it was a good first step in making it more intuitive and accessible.