PeerSquared — Scarlett Howard

B2B SAAS Dashboard for PeerSquared

Peer Squared is a peer-tutoring platform for K-12 students. My team and I were tasked with a dashboard build for school administrators and teachers that could assess and improve the current student experience. With this dashboard design, we began knowing that we needed to streamline the current process and give educators more quantitative accessibility. Our client wanted our design to provide useful information to stakeholders and decision-makers that proves the benefits of PeerSquared.

I worked on a team of UX Designers as a UX Designer and Project Lead. I led daily scrums, conducted meeting agendas, conducted research, user interviews, user testing, created wireframes, and the final prototype.

Research

We created user surveys and sent them to applicable demographics to collect data. This data allowed us to gain valuable insights. We began knowing that students weren’t considered stakeholders in the platform, but since they are users of the platform, we considered them to be decision-makers. Additionally, we compared 13 similar platforms, including Assignment.me, Peer Tutor, and Peer Konnect based on the following:

Function
Pricing
Web Support
Analytics/Data
Features
Pros/Cons

We then interviewed 10 people from our screener survey to assess how teachers and administrators dictate success, and what elements would be most beneficial to include on each of their dashboards. We asked questions such as:

What benefits do students gain from reliable tutors?
What information do teachers use to measure student performance?
How do administrators know a classroom/school is performing well?

Key Quotes

“The entire class doesn’t stop because one student is behind.”
“The goal for administrators is to close the achievement gap. Did our students grow from last year to this year?”
“Success is really hard to gauge in public schools.”

Findings

From our interviews, we found that teachers prefer qualitative data whereas administrators prefer quantitative data when measuring success. Additionally, students provided information about personal motivations on how they chose a peer tutor, and how they intuitively perceive PeerSquared.

Since we found a distinction between how success is evaluated by our two demographics, our research helped us begin to identify what information was most relevant to feature on each of our dashboards.

With these insights, we created our two personas.

We created user flows and site maps next. Each dashboard was designed to reflect the different preferences of teachers and administrators. For teachers, we gave them the tools to oversee and control tutoring programs and qualitative measurements. For administrators, we gave them quantitative data metrics that display overall performance.

Testing

With our navigation designed, we then completed a card sort with six users to test our design. We found four groups of information:

Logistics - such as announcements, calendar, and scheduling
Performance measures - such as feedback, grades, and ratings
Academics - such as lesson plans, student/tutor profiles, and notes
Student Activity - such as retention, skills, and classes

We created a low-fidelity prototype in Axure, followed by 5 informal usability tests to discover if our design was intuitive and efficient. After evaluating this information, we decided to focus on improving the following items:

Student Cards:

Added grade level and up to 2 subjects to student cards
Removed star rating from student cards

Student Profile:

Differentiate student profile vs. tutor profile with session history table for tutors and student report card feature for students
Added icons to profile headers for clear navigation to student calendar and report cards

Session Report: