Teacher Ready Evaluation Tool
Concept, design, prototype and handoff documentation for an educational technology product assessment tool.
Our Role
Concept DevelopmentProduct DesignUX/UI/Visual DesignPrototyping Handoff
Platform
Web
Project Phases
Concept
MVP
Timeline
10 Weeks
Website
teacher-ready.iste.org
Turning manual processes into digital tools
The client presented us with a proof of concept outlining a workflow they’d been managing manually, employing an array of basic off-the-shelf tools. In scenarios where workflows are highly specific or brand consistency is important, building a custom tool is often the most suitable solution. In this instance, our objective was to transform the spreadsheet-based manual workflow into a cohesive design and user experience for a purpose-built web-based digital tool.
Accelerated discovery for a faster project
Our experience with these small tools gives us the ability to read between the lines and do near instant translation of client requirements. That means we can spend more time prototyping and testing and shorten the project timelines consistently. A precise, efficient discovery process allowed us to move from concept, through sketches and user flows quickly. We used these early rough artefacts to understand the client’s need and vision before moving ahead to prototyping. In this case it took less than a week after the initial download of documents from the client for us to complete discovery, and we were able to get into static prototyping to start working out the details of the experience.
Collaborating with Codename was a great experience! Their ability to quickly understand the nuances of our project and transform them into an outstanding design solution left us thoroughly impressed.
Brandon Olszewski
Director of Research – ISTE
Scoring affects user experience
This project demonstrates the effect that the underlying scoring system has on experience of using an assessment tool. The first task is to fully understand the logic of the scoring so that the interface can support it consistently. In addition we need to understand the degree to which the scoring system needs to be visible to the participant. In this case the scoring system was somewhat atypical so it was important to be completely transparent with the participants how the evaluations of educational technology products were being scored. Also because of that atypical nature it was important for us to provide guidance and hints along the way. This is often a place where early stage prototypes want to omit this functionality to save a bit of budget, but our experience suggests that trouble understanding the overall concept of a tool will skew the results and keep teams from being able to accurately assess the tool’s performance. Having the right level of guidance in early stage prototypes can’t be underestimated.
Precise handoff
After testing and refining our static prototype we were able to quickly create thorough hand-off documentation through a tight combination of written features, style guide and handoff files in Adobe XD. The precision of these documents makes a big difference in the speed of development.