From Chaos to Checklists: Helping Students Track Schoolwork

Making Task Tracking Better and Helping Students Stay on Top of Deadlines

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The Gathered Problem

• How might we make it simpler for students to see and manage their deadlines, for assignment and assignment sections, within our EdTech platform?

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The Context

After conducting user research (see next section), I proposed to my team that we prioritise solving this problem as doing assignments is the core flow our student users do on our site.

Our initial thought was just to show assignment due dates on the homepage. But as we dug deeper, the idea grew. The team started looking at a more complete way for students to handle the deadline of all their tasks, giving them more say over their workload.

This brought up some interesting questions – how do we make the solution easy to use, automated where helpful, and still encourage students to take ownership?

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Understanding Our Users

We talked to students and teachers through interviews and surveys, and reviewed our usage data. Here are some key insights:

• Students and teachers wanted to quickly see what was due without having to dig around
• Teachers needed to have the same UI as their students to guide them
• The existing Planner tool wasn’t very popular, so just putting a new feature there might mean it gets ignored too

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Our Exploration

We considered a few different ways to do this:

1. A calendar view,
   
   1. but tasks aren’t really like calendar events as they don't have a start date
2. A simple list of due dates on the homepage,
   
   1. but it wouldn't align with our other homepage offerings if it showed due dates in a widget, without a base feature it drew information from, and
   2. we thought a more comprehensive task system would be better in the long run
3. A structured task manager,
   
   1. where students could see their SLS assignments and also add their own tasks
   2. and we could eventually add due dates to the homepage;
   3. but this feature would require more effort

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Building and Launching the Tasks Feature

We finished designing our new Tasks feature in 5 weeks, which meant the developers could start building it in the next development cycle.

• Trade offs: We found a middle ground between making it easy and encouraging responsibility – students create their own tasks, which helps them feel in control, but the system is designed so we can automate more later.‍
• Alignment with user behaviour: Tasks allowed users to track due dates at the section level of an assignment. This aligned with our marketing efforts, as well as ground feedback of how teachers planned their lessons on our platform.‍‍
• Connecting with our value proposition: We allowed users to attach to a task: teacher-given assignments, resources from our vast library, and goals for adaptive learning.
• ‍Boosting existing features: We put Tasks into our existing Planner. This was a deliberate choice to give the Planner a reason to be used more as its data showed poor adoption. We’ll keep an eye on how people use it and adjust its placement if needed.

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Stakeholder Decisions and Trade-Offs

This project required aligning multiple viewpoints. At one point, key stakeholders debated whether the feature should move forward at all. After careful discussion, we aligned on a minimal viable solution. Here are 2 trade-offs I made for adding friction to the feature:

1. Automated or not?

I believed that populating tasks and marking them as done should be simple, even automated wherever possible.

However, my stakeholders wanted to train students to manage their own workloads, which would aligned with current practices in schools. We settled on creating entry points in students' assignments for them to create assignment-related tasks.

2. Quick and easy, or a little more deliberate?

My comparative analysis of task trackers showed the design norm of tasks being easily marked as complete.

However, the final design added a small step – users have to click and open a task before marking it complete. The hypothesis here was that this might encourage them (especially students) to first review any attachments, such as assignments and self-study resources, rather than mindlessly check tasks off.

I negotiated a follow-up usability study for our team to evaluate this hypothesis, but at least this functional MVP allows us to easily make enhancements that prioritise ease of use.

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My Takeaways

1. The public sector has its imperatives in shaping user behaviour

Since our EdTech platform is owned and managed by the Ministry of Education in Singapore, we may have to make trade offs between shaping education through our design and increasing a feature's usability.

2. Decompose solutions into layers

Since we lacked time for more in-depth research, we split our solution into what was needed for an MVP and what can be done later after conducting research. We made sure that we wouldn't build anything in this first layer that, if taken away, would disappoint users or harm their trust in us.

3. Good communication keeps everyone on track

Requirements shifted a bit during the design, and there was even a point where people questioned the whole project. I experienced how bringing in data and user needs made our  discussions more robust, and how lobbying my stakeholders outside of meeting helped our cross-functional team deliver a working MVP on time.