PEARSON - System of Courses

Pearson’s System of courses, was one of my favorite projects I ever worked on. This company gave me the opportunity to create an elegant solution to help children and teachers achieve a higher level of user experience.

THE PROBLEM
Pearson was concerned about how their current app, it was never up to date and the teams were behind and were not communicating with one another. Besides existing in two different platforms (iOS and Windows tablets), the download time of the content was really long, causing delays in the classroom and, in many cases, slowing down the shared network inside the public schools.

The secondary task was to create a new app, and deploy it onto one new platform, Chromebook. I know it sounds like a lot of change at once, which can be problematic, but in this instance it helped to organize the whole process. This would be a great change for the users and schools as replacement cost of the units was significantly lower than before.

MY ROLE
As a UX Lead I was in charged of creating a new direction for the app. I created new user paths and though about the interaction and how the user could download content on demand.  After some time, I created a demo based on the new ideas we wanted it for this target audience.

RESEARCH
We conducted research testing with kids, parents and teachers. This testing took place in Ohio, and the users were separated between 3 groups. knowledgeable with computers, non familiar with computers, and current app users.

After several testing sessions, we got an 80% approval rate on the chosen direction. This positive outcome was the validation that my team and I needed to justify this path.

THE IDEA
The idea was simple, in order to avoid long downloading time and saturation of the traffic on smaller networks, I proposed to have only the metadata available on initial download. This would allow the user to check a summary of the content before commenting to download the entire data package. Once downloaded, the user would access the units on the lessons, do homework, share it with their teacher, and then remove it from the device and store all that data on the cloud.

THE RESULT
The app was no longer confusing for the user, the research group was really happy to know that the downloading time will be shorter and teachers, especially, were happy to know that content can be downloaded, used and removed to the cloud in a really quick manner, making their classrooms more efficient wile using the app.

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