Context and problem space
The Key Supports gives School and Trust Leadership teams one trusted source to turn to for any challenge they face in their day-to-day job of managing a school, equipping them with expert context-rich resources and guidance, safeguarding training, and CPD.
The Key: Leaders is the biggest seller and main product. It provides a library of articles on all aspects of school leadership; reference tools for policies and compliance tailored to a job role.
😩 The current format the content is presented to the users in is clunky, outdated and does not work as hard to it should.
💡 As such, a series of projects was developed and shaped into 'Multi-format / 3D content' roadmap aimed to make it easier for our members to act on our content and reach the following high level goals:
Improve our content infrastructure, so that even our most basic content works harder ('3D content')
Deliver content in formats beyond the ‘flat’ options (i.e., regular articles and downloads) that are currently available ('multi-format content')
High level outcomes and my role
Working within a dedicated squad consisting of content leads and content PM, full-stack engineers, QA, and myself as a product designer, I designed and shipped 3 projects:
Timeline: 3x6 week cycles
1. Discover
Understanding and collecting business and user needs and goals
Pushing for design thinking - important context ☝️
When I joined the Key, I found out that historically here designers are engaged only at the end of the product-development process, at a point where there is a need to execute a ready-made solution, and designers contribution to the process is limited.
As such, a major focus on my role at the Key has been on advocating on the user-centered design and bringing design earlier into the development process.
The multi-format squad was a born as a result of this efforts. Even though the projects that support the high level goals of the roadmam had already been defined, I was able to push for the time to conduct own research and discovery so that I could
undesrtand the problem space of each project brief deeper to deliver the outcomes that meet users and business needs
collect insights and discover areas of oportunities which can be shaped in future project briefs
What does the data tell us
As a data-driven designer, I wanted to look at the data learn what product features have a significant impact on the business bottom line, what is currently working well or what could beareas of further investigation.
I looked up our most popular content, what are the tops searched tearms for the decision-making group, top searched tearms for te decision-making group.
❓Why fix it, if it ain't broken?
Our interview questions turned to be the most popular content which continuously gets great feedback from members so I wanted to clarify with the content team lead why working on the interview guide creator is a priority.
What do the stakeholders tell us?
Lists of questions and tasks for common roles (e.g., class teacher) are a good starting point for them to adapt to their school’s circumstances, or specific role requirements
Our current content structure does not work well for more specialised roles as members need to bounce between multiple articles to get the things they need
It will be easier for us to scale more tailored approaches to questions
Research
Specify user requirements, validate our assumptions &
identify user goals that must be met for the product to be successful.
#triangulation
Understanding member behaviour & our current offer
➡️ How do users conduct interiews? What is the process?
➡️ How do users prepare for the interviews? Where do they go for help?
➡️ How do you decide what questions you might want to ask at interview?
➡️ What are the main pain points and opportunities?
With the above questions defined, we dived into a 2-week research phase to interview users who are involved in interview process at schools. We used affinity mapping to synthesise findings and write down the most occuring user stories:
User stories:
When I’m recruiting for a role in my school/trust, I need to tailor the questions I’m asking to the job description
When I’m recruiting, I need to set interview tasks that help me assess a candidate’s practical skills
When I’m recruiting for a role for the first time, I need help tailoring the interview to suit the role
Once we have a deeper understanding of the target audience and the problem we’re solving,
it’s time to create an actual solution.
How might we..?
Armed with the insights and specific user stories to cate to, we ran a crazy 8s workshop with content leads who are our subject matter experts to brainstorm solutions
➡️How might we help headteachers without HR experience prepare with recruitement?
➡️How might we help headteachers recruit for a less common roles?
➡️How might we utilise and present our library of 500+ articles in a better way?
➡️How might we streamline the recruitement process for the headteachers?
Grouping ideas and identfying patterns
After the session, I used the project Figma file to jot down the sketches from all team members, grouped ideas and repeating patterns and names the themes
Top 3 solutions defined and voted
I realised that most of the members are on the same page are think alike in terms of possible solutions. Having identified the patterns, we then did a dot voting to narrow down 3 possible ideas
Step-by-step interactive guide
Upload a JD and receive a custome interview guide magically assembled by AI
Dynamic editor to adapt the guide in-product
And the winner is... (announced by the engineering team)
We knew that some of some solutions may not be welcome by the engineering team due to complexity, deadlines, and limitaitos of our current code so we ran another workshop with the developers to define the final direction we are going for - this is when the bespoke interview guide creator was defined.
Building the UX behind the solution
🌟The core bevaviour of the feature is to utilise the existing questions from a wide range of our articles and present a list of proposed questions based on user requirements. Users will then be able to further customise their own interview guide. 🌟
Reviewing Information Architecture
To support the solution, I also needed to review and simplify the Information Architecture considering we are narrowing down the number of articles hosting the interview questions, and to find a way to place the feature within the existing AI and search results page.
Working out the Task Flow
Create designs for prioritised solutions
2nd Diamond - Concep Design - v1, v2, v3...
When it came to the design part, I always go 'wide' again the the process and explore a variety of solutions to run by my team and get feedback. Originally, I explored 3 behaviour options:
1️⃣ Remove irrelevant questions from the list.
2️⃣ Pick (aka select) relevant questions from the suggested list; then review your guide.
3️⃣ Drag and drop OR Adding from athe suggested list.
(2 options - user interview guide takes up primary space on the right and scrolls through the suggested list on the left OR both suggested list and user guides take up equal amount of space where the suggested list is placed on the left)
Having received feedback from the team and key stakeholders, I landed on 2 version I wanted to continue with and conduct user testing - I was still unsure what behaviour matches users mental model, and allows to complete their tasks faster.
Uset testing 2 final versions
V1
V2
Select the relevant questions from te list; open up a sliding drawer to review and edit your guide
Drag and drop relevant questions from the left into the bespoke guide on the right
Type of testing: moderated remote usability testing
Typeof testing: moderted remote usability testing with 2 prototypes.
Audience: internal & external users directly involved in HR and recruitment at schools.
Goals
Test overall usability of the Interview guide creator.
Test V1 vs V2 for usability and task completion rates.
Task completion:
- users can easily add questions they need for their scenario
- users can find the questions they need for their scenario
- users can edit their interview guide by adding/removing questions.
Collect genenal feedback on usability, scannability & content structure:
- check what content is needed for the users inside the interview & task cards to make a decision to choose it.
- test top navigation inside the tool by topics and by type of content
Key takeaways
🎊 5 out of 5 participants completed the task faster with V1.
🎉 5 out of 5 participants were able to filter questions by topic and type of content as intended.
🔥 3 out of 5 participants failed to use the navigation by type of content
💡3 out of 5 participants expected to see both questiosn and tasks inside the user guide.
Create designs for prioritised solutions
Taks:
You are recruiting a teacher assistant who is responsible for attendance, behaviour management and teaching aspects. You want to find relevant interview questions. You can review curated list for supporing staff but ultimately need something more tailored. You want to pick 1 question from 'attendance' topic, skip tasks and review your guide.
How do we know we did it right. Key metrics:
🌟Positive feedback from the users
🏫Percentage of users generating bespoke lists instead of using the streamlined offer of pre-curated lists
📈Increased usage (uplift on baseline of articles for relevant roles)
Learnings and reflections:
Find ways to do your own discovery and research
Even though your PMs may tell your they already know the solution, find ways to varify these assumptions with your own research.
Involve engineers in feedback sessions
This will not only help build trust and improve relationship with the squad, but also help you take the right direction when solutioning as technicaly feasibility often is the main priority.
Background & context
👉Completing the spreadsheet requires additional information, and it's hard to surface these details in the excel format.
👉The calculation is part of a wider process (which is why it sits within an article with other information) - we’re providing poor UX by sending members bouncing between things unnecessarily
Background & context
👉Members miss our messaging that batches of articles are under review
👉Members don’t realise that they’re seeing accurate content and that an article may have changed, or is under review
👉Current system for managing updates is clunky, time-consuming for content editors.
%20(1).png)
.png)
.svg)