Pressreader
Overview
Pressreader(PR) is working on the e-Reading and digital publishing experiences for educational institutions. PR has provided an engaging textbook service and platform helping schools and publishers get connected and bringing digital access to all the textbooks in an online onboarding process.
As a lead designer, I worked on interactive school onboarding solutions for school administrators and teachers to plan for their future course booklists and allow students to make the purchase in the bookstore.
Problem
The current school onboarding process with setting up a booklist is completely manual through a spreadsheet(CSV). Without an automatic system, the team involved is not able to track task activities and changes to the booklists in the last minutes, which results in delays and inaccuracies in the process.
How might we help school users to review the current curriculums, build the booklist with the textbooks adopted by various publishers, and approve the requests and changes to the booklist for purchase?
Goals
Together with EP’s team planning and support, we created a school onboarding platform with booklist, booklist approval and book catalogue features that could help Account managers, school administrators and teachers to focus on preparing book selection, keep connected and map out their future booklist planning for students.
Automatic Booklist System
I led the design of an end-to-end booklist creation platform for schools, enabling teachers to plan courses and order books based on enrollment numbers and semester schedules. Through interviews with teachers, administrators, and procurement staff, we gathered insights on their real-life challenges and identified key features, such as automated enrollment syncing and book data integration from vendors. Collaborating with the PM, we mapped out detailed user flows, defined user roles and permissions, and created an intuitive UI that allowed teachers to select and order books efficiently. The design featured real-time updates from the SIS system, ensuring accurate order quantities and reducing manual errors. This solution streamlined the entire book ordering process, improved accuracy, and provided a more seamless experience for all users.
Interview with our Audiences
As a team to get us started, we kicked off the discussion with a sticky note session in Miro with our current school customers thinking about what a typical school start-up process might look like. We collected the feedback and believed this session would help us to explore the issues in common and how usually the school members were able to tackle them and determine their needs and motivations in seeing the features as the followings:
Questions to be considered
How did you usually pick books for the courses?
How much time do you think you need to set up a school?
What information would you want to receive on the status of the platform setup?
What are your real-life experiences with setting up the books and approval flow?
How would you most frequently categorize the courses in your school?
What are the major pain points people face when setting the onboarding?
The questions asked in the interview had resulted in good impacts that the main users: Account Managers (AM), School Administrators (SA) and teachers had mapped out their needs and features that should be included in the platform. The dot-voting helped us to plan out the goal and feature release timeline.
Research Results
We conducted the user feedback and understood the business requirement of the first design phase. The documentation and survey helped us to get planned ahead knowing the user’s touch point and deliver the roadmap, estimates and constraints to the stakeholders.
School onboarding is great at
Providing a booklist for users to select, edit and add books for a course.
Automating the SIS integration by recently updating the book information and allowing users to know what courses and books are assigned to the teachers.
Approving and submitting the book’s info. requested by the teachers and sending them for purchase.
Choosing the best books with different optional providers for students.
Allowing schools to make changes in the last minutes before purchase.
Feature Lists & Role Definitions
It’s time to build and think of possible features from our findings with the focused group. We used the ’How Might We Statement’ to define the most important challenges and highlighted the questions and assumptions for the solution that might work or not out there. This way helped me to define the features from getting the small elements to big components, and prioritize the MVP tasks for our project roadmap.
Demo
My first task was to create a draft demo for brainstorming and getting feedback from the stakeholders. It was always challenging to come up with the first screen and layout. Thinking about how might we help teachers to view what books and courses are assigned to them, I needed to understand the relationships between courses, sections and the book assignment process. With the framework and data we had for the current product, I understood the hierarchy of the structure and iterated the concept by drawing the mindmap to make connections.
I overcame the challenge by exploring and sketching the ideas with the different options of the layout on paper. Finally, I’ve decided to create a filter to sort booklists into courses; my final insight turned to be the most friendly and interactive layout where all the features could fit into the screen.
User’s Statement
As the user, I want to be able to see the recent status of the booklist activities being updated by the actions taken in place.
As the user, I want to have a dashboard to easily view all the recent courses and books being used with textbook adoptions.
As the user, I want to be able to select the books from last year for the current year by adding, editing and deleting the books in the course.
As the user, I want to see the course enrollment and how many book quantities are to be ordered.
As the user, I want to request a new book and add it to my course list.
As the user, I want to be able to submit my finalized course booklist for approval and purchase.
The initial sketches identified the potential layout and interface elements that finally made this wireframe cover almost all of our initial ideas into the final product. I designed the filter to be placed on the left that allowed users to view the course and booklist simultaneously with the updated status for easier check-in.
Collecting Feedback
Understanding some designs might not be feasible without integration and data to be built from the developer’s side, while others wanted more features to be considered and included in the mockups. It’s was challenging to prioritize the features collected by two sides of people.
My PM and I managed to solve the problems by taking all the notes down and combining all the good points to see if the feedback could improve our initial business requirement and goal. We documented the questions and validated their certainty and risks to help us define undiscoverable answers and cut down the unnecessary interactions and save us time as well.
How do we help users to review the book info. and pick the best books for their courses to be purchased?
How do we make teacher booklist plans way faster to make them submitted before the deadline?
How do we make sure the booklist won’t be sent for purchase while the teachers are still in book selection?
How can we help users quickly find the new books and make the changes to the booklist in the last minutes before the deadline?
Book Library
Teachers needed an efficient way to select books from the vendor library for their courses, but there was a challenge when a required book couldn’t be found in the current database. I worked with the PM and designed a streamlined “Book Request” feature for teachers to handle missing books from the book library. This function allowed teachers to search for books by ISBN, add them to courses, and track the status of manual requests from vendors. The UI addressed scenarios like unfound books, alternative options, and the ability to cancel or swap requests. This improved the course planning process, simplified the book request workflow, and increased overall efficiency by automating tasks, providing a clear and user-friendly system for all stakeholders.
Design Product flow and Prototypes
Early on, I helped the team to define the user stories in Miro for what each role would be responsible for features, actions, and interactive patterns. As a product team, we shared opinions as they could propose different stories by shuffling the cards around. I wanted to make sure we knew well what stories and scenarios we were building for who and why.
Every week, I would update the team with my mockups, stories and thinking to make sure everyone was on the same page. Sometimes we thought the solutions might work and turned out they didn’t, the PM and I had to quickly come up with the new use cases and make new changes to the mockups and guidelines for the developers to follow up.
Team Collaboration & Feedback
Working with these amazing designers was the best experience I have ever had. Although most of the time we worked individually from home, I learned so many design experiences from them in the in-person workshop. Preparing design thinking, writing documentation, getting feedback and chatting about life were very helpful and the reason why we kept in touch all the time. The solutions and skills we shared with each other had supported me to resolve problems and direct most of us into the right place. Thanks to you all! Good Job!