Francis Phan

Product Designer

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Exponential Pathways - Administrative Portal

Flexible Management for a Youth Career Pathways Advising Platform

Dashboard Design

Timeline: 6 Months (Q3 2022 - Q1 2023)

Platforms: Desktop, Mobile Web

Core Team: 2 Product Designers, 1 Project Manager, 5 Engineers

Tools: Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, Jira, Miro

Link: https://www.vantagepoint-inc.com/products/exponential-pathways

Problem: Different organizations have different needs, processes, and systems.

Opportunity: How might we build a management system accommodating organizations’ pre-existing approaches while making integration seamless?

Solution: A management platform that can create custom hierarchies with cascading access to reflect organizations’ preexisting practices without straining educators.

Exponential Pathways (XP) Is A Digital Career Readiness Advisement Platform

Exponential Pathways (XP) is a digital career readiness advisement platform, co-developed with the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), for teachers or advisors at high school districts and workforce boards to support career readiness lesson plans for 8th-12th grade students, young adults, and opportunity youth including interest and skill assessments, matching to local career paths and exposure to short-term and long-term skill-building activities they can pursue.

homepage of student view

My Initial Task Was To Develop 4 Distinct Admin Levels

Initially, I was assigned to create four levels of administration: 1. site admin, 2. super admin, 3. principal admin, and 4. teacher admin. Each level controlled the one beneath it. The site admin had complete control over the application, while the teacher admin could only manage their assigned cohort and its functions.

Started By Auditing Vantage Point’s Family Of Products

I started by auditing Vantage Point Consulting’s family of products to understand their general look and feel. My main goal was to gather common elements across these products to build the admin portal quickly and easily using existing design patterns.

Exponential Pathways (Student)

Experience Registry

Datastop.io

Virtual Mentor

A Quick Turnaround Made Me Prioritize The Product Requirements And Limited My Available Resources

In my initial version, I emphasized analytics as the main element of the class and student dashboard. There was not enough focus on individual students, but rather on the class as a whole. It did not help educators guide or understand students' desired past skills or interests, nor did it provide educators with the easy and necessary insights they required.

Only 30% of testers said they would use this application on a weekly basis (approval rate).

wireframes of version 1.0

I Had to Backtrack To Truly Understand the Users

I went back to the drawing board to develop a new solution, aiming to align product requirements more closely with user needs.

I started by conducting user interviews with educators in my network. Using the findings from my initial research, I created personas for educators. These personas highlighted their daily interactions, current frustrations, and needs for an EdTech platform. I then combined these insights with the initial user requirements.

Vision

A product flexible enough to meet different organizations' needs, reducing educators' workload and emphasizing the student-educator connection.

Ammendment To User Flow

A common theme that I saw amongst organizations, was that each one was different. Different systems have different needs. One organization's hierarchical structure might differ from another's. For example, an after-school organization using the application might not need as many levels of administration as a school district.

We separated organization onboarding into its own flow to allow other admins to undertake that responsibility off of educators and shift it onto themselves. We allow for educators to go in quickly to a prepared system.

Organization Set Up - User Flow for Site Administrators

Organization Set Up - User Flow for Educators

Wireframes 2.0

After I understood my goals and vision for the design solution - flexibility, engagement, and support, I began wireframing, keeping ease of management at the forefront.

Style Guide And Component Library To Solidify Visual Identity

I created a new branding guideline for the student portal, aiming for something unique and identifiable while incorporating similar elements across both student and administrative portals to ensure cohesiveness. I also developed a component library to maintain consistency across different screens and uses.

These were designed to adhere to federal accessibility guidelines provided.

Testing Again

After showcasing the product to the leaders of the pilot programs, I noticed educators weren't fully satisfied. This led me to collect valuable feedback and reassess what information was most important.

During testing, we staged the product for internal trials. This step helped us spot and fix any issues before the full launch with our pilot partners at the start of 2023. Educators wanted more emphasis on student’s paths, not only their results.

Enhancing Existing Systems With Flexible Integration

Organizations use various systems for career pathway guidance, from guidance counselors to specific teachers or individuals. Our system emphasizes flexibility, seamlessly integrating with existing structures to meet each organization's unique needs. It provides customizable administrative levels, enabling organizations to adjust with as much or as little administrative oversight as needed while promoting access across multiple levels.

Engagement First: Empowering Student Connection With Educators

The administrator portal prioritizes strengthening the educator-student connection, aiming beyond mere task tracking. The student dashboard emphasizes information beneficial for meaningful discussions between educators and students, such as their goals, strengths, experiences, and skill suitability.

Supporting Staff Through Reducing Administrative Burden

The objective was to lighten the workload of educators, who often have countless tasks, by delegating administrative duties to specific admins or site administrators. This redirection enables teachers to concentrate on enhancing student involvement. Duties such as creating, organizing, and managing classes can now be effectively performed by other administrators.

Simplified Administration With Intuitive Organization & User-Centric Creation

Simplified interfaces allow users to access necessary information quickly. The organization, assignment, and student interfaces display different data based on admin searches. To prevent confusion and clutter, only essential information is displayed.

Keeping Elements Consistent For Student Mobile Web Screens

After designing the administrative portal, I was tasked with transitioning the student portal from desktop to mobile web platforms. My main objective was to retain the elements' similarity to their web versions. I established a design system to ensure that components would preserve their primary function and appearance.

Developer Hand Off

Detailed QA follow-up sessions ensured alignment between PMs, designers, and FE developers by clarifying interactions, animations, conditional fields, and logic that may not be immediately obvious. These sessions revealed design gaps and required adjustments to meet expectations accurately.

Result + Impact

After user interviews, I asked participants to answer a few questions to collect data. I followed up before the pilot program launched to see how educators were getting situated.

Increase from 30% → 85% of participants stated that they could envision themselves using this application on a weekly basis.

57% decrease in average onboarding time for educators after new user flows.

95% of participants found value in the product and wished that something like this had existed when they were career planning.

Reflection + Learning

My biggest takeaway from this project was being patient with users. They may not know exactly what they want or how to verbalize their needs, but helping them get there is part of the challenge. When discussing EdTech and technology in general, there are a lot of technical terms and limitations. It's important to remember that not everyone knows them. We have to find a middle ground.

If I had more time on this project, I would love to dive deep into the analytics function. This was an early feature that was put on the back burner because it was not essential to the user's experience at the time. I would love to figure out how to synthesize data for educators so they can gain new insights without generalizing students' journeys.

This project was very rewarding for me. I started with many preconceived notions that changed as I talked to users. Advocating for and addressing users' frustrations made all the challenges worthwhile. I’m proud to have worked on a product that can shape youth career exploration.

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