Vineyard App Camp (VAC) partners with schools to teach specialized classes by hiring non-traditional teachers.
UX Design
Vineyard App Camp
Research-based redesign of dashboard
Directors (VAC employees), use a dashboard to manage school, class, and teacher details and communications.
My role
Sole designer, UX research & design
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Miro, Whimsical, ChatGPT
The organization
“it's a little clunky, that's a nice way of putting it”
Project starting point
Redesign after research
Understanding Directors’ tasks and struggles
Employees are constantly dealing with a bug-riddled app that has no system feedback when things don’t go according to plan. In addition, they have to work extra hard to appear legitimate when reaching out to schools and potential teachers.
“takes a minute to two minutes [to load], which might not seem like a lot of time, but when you're on a call with another Director it can be so cumbersome”
Wasted time
“feels very ancient and it feels a little bit nonprofessional”
”a lot of what we do is making sure we don't seem like a scam”
Appear illegitimate
“really challenging to not have to do things twice, you know I really try to optimize my time”
Disrupts workflow
Screenshots of original app
Potential improvements
A research-based redesign can help reduce cognitive load for employees while cutting down on task time
Reduce steps to save time
Reduce number of steps for each workflows and organize information in a more intuitive manner so users can find information easily
Increase trust in actions
Present appropriate feedback immediately when there are system errors and provide suggestions to recover from errors
Goals
Goal 1: Simplify workflows
Goal 2: Extract and organize important info
Goal 1
Simplify workflows
I identified 3 primary workflows every Director had in common that would make the biggest impact, consulting with stakeholders through my decision making.
Goal 1: Simplify workflows
Flow 1: Attendance check
- Attendance section too small to see content clearly and there’s no separator between content
- Teacher attendance is found under “Afterschool Weekly Calendar”
- Director can’t update confirmation on their end, having to manually track attendance status
Screenshots of original flow
Attendance check flow update
My changes allow users to find information and take action they expect and need without confusing navigation
Before
Users have to use a button to navigate to attendance checks that shows no indication attendance checks are part of the page
After
Changes made:
A: Eliminate extra step to view attendance
B: Allow Director to track teacher’s attendance correctly on platform
Directors can now update attendance status directly from the home page
Goal 1: Simplify workflows
Flow 2: Assign substitutes
Requesting and assigning subs are broken into disjointed flows
Simplifying substitute attendance
- Combined substitute assignment into single flow
- Reduced 10+ steps
A more readable sub requests page
Before
After
Goal 1: Simplify workflows
Flow 3: Assign teachers
- Reduced flows by 2-9 steps (depending on decisions)
Before
After
A logical teacher assignment flow
- Reduced flows by 2-9 steps (depending on decisions)
- Eliminated repetitive steps
Before
After
Goal 2
Extract and organize important information
Updated home page
Added overview to home page, side navigation, and flexible layout to leave room for additional features in the future.
Use table view
A table shows relevant important information for quick browsing and filters help users identify primary information.
Update teacher profile view
A two-pane view allows Directors to browse with ease and segmenting information into tabs reduces cognitive load when looking for data.
Design iterations
I tested my concepts before moving onto high fidelity mockups
Changed app entry point
Before
After
Added nearby teachers feature
Before
After
Switched from card to table view
Before
After
Outcomes
Positive feedback
“[the new design] has interview notes, which right now I can’t access unless I open in a separate window, which again just takes more time”
“this is super clean looking and nice and if I have to share my screen to show, you know, a school schedule, to my eyes it looks much more appealing”
“it has all the right information that I want to see”
“I love that the [student] feedback [section] is already there”
Impact
-20 steps
Over 20 steps were cut out of 3 workflows, including consolidating flows for a more seamless experience
39.71%
Percentage of time saved for sub assignment flow based off user interviews and usability testing
Conclusion
Work in progress
There’s still much to do for this application, including more usability testing, improving and migrating the information architecture on the original dashboard, and redesigning more flows and pages to help employees, such as how they view seasonal notes for each school and class
Constraints
Engineering team of 1
Reduce number of steps for each workflows and organize information in a more intuitive manner so users can find information easily
Limited time with users
I had limited time with employees’ to run user interviews, so I focused on optimizing flows over the of overhauling the information architecture of the entire app based on my conversations with stakeholders and their priorities.
Reflections
I faced more challenges around collaboration than I'd anticipated and in the future will set expectations up front more clearly. Overall, it fun to work on a project where I had to learn about a new type of job and industry.