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“Teachers have been filing a lot of bug reports about Classes. Adarsh, can you take a look and recommend what we should do?
Context: Teachers used the Classes feature to import classrooms from their school software onto Wayground. Once imported, they could automatically assign quizzes to their students from within Wayground and have it sent directly to the students.
It had been 3 years since the feature was launched and it had grown larger since then but that allowed bugs to creep in.
I was brought in to solve these bug reports and recommend the way forward.
When I encounter something new, my first step is to always go through it end to end and form a view of the current state of affairs.
Then I look at what the users are saying. What are they struggling with? What are they complaining about? What do they wish for?
Some problems have obvious solutions.
For example, one teacher mentioned that "When the student clicks on the link I've sent them to join their class the window that pops up does not have the class ID. It only has my name. When I send a bunch of invites for a bunch of classes, it would help if when I'm checking and click on the URL it know that it is the correct class and my name."
The fix here is simple. Figure out a way to include the classname in the modal. You can see the before/after below.
Other problems weren't so straightforward.
Teachers complained about some students not receiving assignments on their school software when they assigned it on Wayground, the exact problem Classes was supposed to solve. Something was not reliable about its functionality.
After talking to some users we learned that in American schools, students often change classes mid-year. Some drop-out, others join in. Teachers would make these modifications on their school software but never end up making those changes to those classes on quizizz.
The way the current design expected them to solve it was to import the entire class again and teacher's wouldn't know to do that until they reached out to support after having faced the issue.
This was not ideal. Good design should prevent errors from occurring in the first place.
The space of solutions to this problem was large but this was an important problem to solve. After several iterations, I eventually converged on the following recommendations.
- Have the refresh roster button be more prominent.
- Display the number of students in each class at all times so the teacher can subconsciously cross-check if there's any discrepancy.
- When importing a class, add extra metadata/states depending on if the class's current state. Each class could be in one of three states, not-imported, imported, or archived. The modal didn't show this information. The new design surfaced this information so that the user was clearer about the action they were taking. If it's a not-imported class, they would have to import it. If it's an already imported class, they are refreshing the roster. If it's an archived class, they are unarchiving and importing it again.
As I worked on these smaller fixes, they highlighted a bigger issue.
The integration with the school software was only surface deep and a lot more could be done. Right now, teachers would integrate it once and then forget about it. The classes page was only used once, at the start of the year, and then they'd mostly forget about it. But we could do a lot more with Classes.
I flipped the question to: What can Classes do to provide value to the teacher?
Wayground was a formative assessment tool. These scores were mostly for the teacher to figure out if the class was doing well or not.
Showcasing class performance and effort metrics. And all the class reports in a single place.
Teachers could also click on a student and see their scores in a single place.
Also modified the home-page
These changes cemented Classes's position as a first-class citizen on the product. In the two years after this launch, the classes page often featured as one of the pages teachers spent a lot of time on, and it became a viable surface area for new feature launches.
