Dashboard architecture
Optimised navigation, organised content more effectively, and improved labelling for a more intuitive experience.
Atom Learning rapidly transformed from a small start-up to a major player in the UK's eLearning industry. This quick growth led to skipping the proper UCD process, resulting in untested additions and lack of user feedback, which significantly impacted findability.
Problem space
We started by interviewing parents to learn about their experience with Atom, their needs, and pain points. We then consulted with Customer Success and sent out a survey to reach more users. After synthesising all this data, we found a repeated pain point among parents:
Parents were extremely busy. During the week, they were occupied with taking their kids to school, working, commuting, doing housework, and many other tasks, only to get ready for the next day and repeat the cycle. They had very little time to check their child's progress on the platform, if at all, and it took too long for them to do so.
Based on our findings, we created the following problem statement: 'Parents need an intuitive way to track their child’s progress and activity on the platform. This is their main purpose for logging in, but it's currently difficult to find, and they don’t have the time to search for it.'
With a defined problem statement, we focused on our first step to improving the parent experience by optimising the Information Architecture (IA).
Solution space
The method we used to meet our users' expectations and structure the parent dashboard was card sorting.
We wrote all the navigation options from the parent dashboard on 24 cards, which were shared with 10 participants. They were first asked to group the cards they thought fell under the same category and then to label those categories. Once they finished, we followed up with three questions: Were any items especially easy or difficult to place? Did any items seem to belong in two or more groups? What are your thoughts about the items left unsorted (if any)?
After concluding the open card sort, four clear categories emerged: Resources, Overview, Help, and My Account.
Four cards were consistently left out by users: Tuition, Partners, Dashboard, and Switch Accounts. The main reasons provided were that the labels were unclear or lacked value. We decided to exclude these from the next step, as they either linked to the same content as other labels, lacked value to the user, or were unclear in the navigation.
To validate the structure created during the open card sort, we provided the predetermined four categories to 16 users and shared the remaining 20 cards. They were asked to place the cards under the category they felt the cards belonged to. This enabled us to evaluate how well the existing category structure supported the content.
All users had no problem placing the cards under each category, and no cards were left unplaced. Privacy and Policies were the only cards that changed categories, moving from 'My Account' to 'Help'.
Card sorting helped us organise the dashboard’s content to match our users' mental model, improving findability and enabling parents to quickly access their child's progress. It also provided easy access to the student portal to check their activity.
The new 'Resources' category was very well received by our users. Since their secondary actions involved setting up work for students, they now had a specific place to go for this task.
Objectives and key results
We increased the percentage of parents accessing the student portal from their dashboard by 13%, surpassing our success metric of 8%. Additionally, we achieved our secondary goal by increasing the percentage of parents setting up work from the portal by 7%, exceeding the established success metric of 5%.
