Redesign of Google Classroom: A UX Case Study
Background: What, why, how?
- As a third year classroom teacher who recently had to transition to distance-teaching because of the pandemic, I realized the importance of offering teachers viable options to distance-teach.
- Google Classroom is a website, with a mobile app, that is used by both teachers and students. Teachers can post assignments, grade assignments and provide feedback directly on Google Classroom. I want to focus on teachers’ experiences of using Google Classroom, features they liked that could be improved, and also suggest new features to improve the efficiency of using Google Classroom as a teacher.
- I sent out a survey to a group of high-school teachers between the ages of 25–65 years old in the San Francisco, Bay Area. The survey aims to pinpoint current uses of Google Classroom, and pain points. I categorized common responses to pain points that teachers expressed in the survey with a pie chart below.
While there were a variety of responses to pain points, I chose to focus on the two that were part of the highest bucket: grading and multiple classes.
The Problem
Lack of efficiency in managing multiple classrooms of the same subject within Google Classroom
Currently in Google Classroom, a teacher typically creates a classroom for each period/block. So if a Physics teacher had 5 periods of physics, the teacher would create 5 different google classrooms, one per class. A handful of teachers found a workaround by adding all classes of the same topic into one giant classroom. There are challenges to both methods that teachers are currently using to manage multiple classrooms, which I will explain in the diagrams below.
Grading and giving feedback takes an enormous amount of time per individual student
Teachers enjoyed the comment aspect of grading and being able to give feedback individually to students. However, teachers complained about grading being “tedious” and while they enjoyed giving individual feedback, it took too long to provide individual feedback for every single student, especially when a lot of the feedback given are about the same common issues. A lot of teachers resorted to just giving feedback to those who personally request it since it is not feasible to respond to every single student with quality feedback.
Goal
To provide teachers with tools to maximize efficiency in digital teaching which in turn gives individual students better feedback and learning opportunities.
Redesign Proposal
Sections
Include a feature that allows teachers to organize their students into sections of their choice. Some examples of potential sections are periods, blocks, after-school groups, tutoring groups, etc.
Feedback saver with auto-grading capabilities
Include a feature in grading that gives teachers an option to “save” their feedback. They can quickly access the feedback when giving feedback to other students who make the same common mistake. In addition, for each piece of feedback that is saved, teachers have the option to attach grade-points to that feedback to allow for auto-grading.
Solutions
Before going in to solutions, I would like to share what Google Classroom currently looks like from a teacher’s point of view.
Here is what Google Classroom currently looks like, more specifically the two pages that I am focusing on in my redesign:
Note: In the images that follow, everything that is marked by yellow are changes to Google Classroom that are part of my redesign.
Feature 1
Sections can be created, and deleted.
The Sections feature includes a side bar of all sections that have been created by the teacher. In the images above, there are options to add a section and delete an existing section. When adding a section, the teacher can give the section a name of their choice, and add students from their “All Students” roster. They can also delete existing sections, where students will be removed from the section and can be found under “All Students”. Finally, there is a “See archived” option, where teachers can see previously deleted sections and revive/edit them.
By implementing a Sections feature for Google Classroom, this solves both challenges to Problem 1 (Problem 1: Lack of efficiency in managing multiple classrooms of the same subject within Google Classroom). With this feature, instead of re-posting many of the same assignments and announcements to all classes of the same subject, teachers can post once and apply that post to multiple sections. For grading, teachers will be able to grade based off of different sections, making it easier to transfer grades from Google Classroom grades to their main grading platform.
Feature 2
Feedback saver with auto-grader capabilities
This feature consists of two parts. The first part is the Feedback-saver. The second part that comes hand in hand with the first is the Auto-grader.
The purpose of Feedback-saver is to provide a more efficient way for teachers to give individual feedback to students, so students know how the assignment was graded and what the expectations are for future assignments. This is helpful for common mistakes that teachers may see across their classes.
The Auto-grader feature follows the Feedback-saver, in which teachers have the option to attach grade point values for the feedback they have saved. For example, all students with the feedback of “no work shown” will automatically receive a 50% deduction in their total grade. In the example provided by the images above, 5/10 points will be deducted.
What I Learned
With this being my first redesign case study, I learned a lot about the each step in the process of UX research and design. Here are some of my main takeaways:
- When coming up with survey questions, open-ended questions yield more informative responses than very specific questions do. “Tell me about a time…” and “Walk me through...” proved a lot more helpful than asking yes/no questions. Asking open-ended questions also helped dissolve my biases (as a teacher myself) and not just find responses that validate my own biases, but helped me identify problems holistically.
- UX is complex. With each new idea came 5 more questions that I had to consider. What is clicking on that going to look like? How will I organize the page so that users will easily find what they’re looking for? Will this draw attention in the most effective way? Is this button drawing too much attention? Will this idea provide more problems than solutions?
- Usability is not a given. What makes sense to the designer may not make sense to a new eye, and that’s what makes empathy so important. Throughout the project, I had to constantly trick myself into seeing my design ideas for the first time, and look for ambiguity that may appear. A quotation from a teacher I surveyed “For it to be functional, teachers should become power users” really resonated with me. A short course or even a video walk-through of Google Classroom features would be helpful for many teachers, including young teachers like me.
Thank you for reading!
