Teachmint: The Unorganized Study Material
During the summers, I had the opportunity to work as a Product Design Intern at Teachmint in Bengaluru for approximately 10 weeks, where I worked with one of the best design teams I could have imagined. During my internship, I worked on redesigning the experience of the Study Material and Homework tab in virtual classrooms in the Teachmint App.
Introduction
Teachmint is a leading provider of education infrastructure solutions, with 10 million+ downloads on the Play Store that power the education ecosystem to help students learn better. Since it started, its classroom technology has helped millions of teachers make classrooms that are global and ready for the future.
Problem Statement
Study Material is a tab inside a classroom used by teachers to share subject related documents and other study materials with students so that students can find the required documents when they need it.
However it is seen that, Teachers are uploading the files but students are unable to find the required document in the Study Material tab because documents seem to be unorganized, and thus finding a document is like finding a needle in a haystack.
My Journey
Before jumping right into the app’s existing UI of the Study Material tab, I decided to decipher the whole flow of how the Teachmint app works.
Knowing more about users
During the time of my internship, Teachmint had four major stakeholders:
- Admins
- School Teachers (my stakeholder for the project)
- Students
- Parents
What is Study Material?
Study Material is a tab inside a classroom used by teachers to share references and other materials for helping students.
Organized..?🫠
As discussed with the product team, the key metric to be solved for the problem was:
- Increase usage of study material by teacher & students
- Drive teachers to keep files more organized.
As a college student, I was able to understand how important and useful this feature is, making me more curious to identify the issues with its usability. So as the next step, I decided to review the available data and find out how exactly teachers have been using it.
I went through around a week’s worth of data consisting 800 entries, which was not what I expected. Teachers were mostly dumping the data in the root folder of the Study Material, neither naming the files properly nor creating separate folders for the chapters. After doing more research, I understood that there could be four major issues that were responsible for the problem in hand:
- Files once created cannot be moved, i.e. Teachers have to delete a file and then re upload it to the new folder to change its location.
- Folder creation was a fairly recent add-on to the app hence there was still lack of adoption to the feature.
- Teachers need to move multiple files to a folder to create chapters but it couldn't be done as multiple file selection was unavailable for them.
- Another issue was that folder could not be created inside a folder and so teachers could not group similar files using nested folders.
For Example, Study Material(Science) > Physics/Chemistry/Biology > Units > Chapters.
Analysis📝
In order to confirm the hypothesis I had after my research, I interviewed some teachers who used the app regularly and was assured that:
- Inability to move files and
- Redundant process of renaming a file
were the main reasons why teachers were not using folders and chose to keep everything unorganized.
For further analysis, As we know cut, copy, paste, move etc. are some common actions associated with any task at our hands when we use a mobile or a desktop and have been used for years in file managers, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. I decided to take a close look at how they work.
Moving Step by step 🎬
Initially, it looked like such a simple task but when I dug deeper, I understood that each step needed a detailed attention to provide an efficient and intuitive flow for teachers.
1. Select File(s)
Since Teachmint had a ratio of 1:3 IOS to Android users and it did not use native OS applications (i.e. Swift for IOS and Kotlin/React native for Android), one interface needs to fulfill both requirements.
2. Choose Action
According to the problem statement, to drive the action of moving files from the root folder (study material) to the respective subject folder, the feature should be intuitive and easy to access (also, “Download” is one of the most used features, and multiple file downloads will save a lot of time for users).
3. Moving files (Paradox of “Move”)
I never thought this would be the toughest decision to make in this problem, as it never occurred to me that moving a file could be this complex.
To start, one of the basic principles we learn in Human Computer Interaction is that while designing a digital interface, one should try to mimic the process as it is in the physical world and hence using our natural mental model passed down to us for thousands of years.
On one hand Google Drive and OneDrive follow the process where a user has to go inside a folder to move any file, while on the other, Dropbox believes in letting users only select a folder where they want to move their file.
Once stumbled at this, I started user testing between the two flows and after doing Gorilla testing on 7–8 of the teachers, I got two major insights about this:
- Teachers have to upload files right at the end of the class and sometimes even in between the class, hence the process must be quick.
- Folder names are extremely logical, suggesting content of it😅 so that teachers already know what kind of files are in a folder.
Interference: Teachers have very less time to move/add items and as they use it on a regular basis, but they know exactly where to move the files and content of the folder.
Final User Interface 🎯
So, After many iterations, tests, and endless items in my mood board, I was able to complete the whole flow and now users can:
1. Select multiple files.
2. Move and download the multiple selected files.
3. Create nested folders.
During the discussion with developers, I understood that study material was developed in such a way that everything is actually present at the root directory and they are not moving the files but just changing the pointer of that file to another location, i.e. similar to using pass by reference rather than pass by value.
Hence it was taking <0.1s to move 20 files 👀
Future amendments
In the near future, Teachmint will introduce Lesson Plan where teachers will see all the lessons/topics/chapters for a particular subject depending on the class and education board.
To automate the folder creation process, A folder can be created for a chapter as soon as the teacher begins to teach it; hence it will not just save the teacher’s effort to create a folder, but will also drive teachers to add files to the respective folders finding them empty.
Impact✌️
Leading Metric: There was a 40% increase in ratio of files in a particular folder vs files in Root directory.
Lagging Metric: There was 12% increase in teachers cohort and 18% increase in student cohort on study material in 1 month.
I really want to thank Malik Shaikh, I.n.kindle, Ashish, Rohit, and Rachit Garg for being a team that always answered my never ending questions and helped me in the right direction.
Working closely with product managers and developers taught me many things. It helped me understand the iterative process and how early communications can save a lot of time in shipping a project.