Improving Teacher Retention Rates — a UX case study
The Challenge:
In the United States, the teacher retention rate is low due to a variety of factors. With high turnover rates for teachers, schools have to train and prepare newly hired teachers to the school’s policies more frequently. This can induce unneeded strain on an already difficult education system and its students.
My team and I were tasked to create a website that addresses the issues that are causing teachers to leave their jobs or the profession as a whole.
The Team:
The Process:
- Empathize — to gain an empathetic understanding of the problem that we are trying to solve.
- Define — to define the core problems using the information we gathered.
- Ideate — to design solutions to the discovered problems being faced.
- Prototype — to identify the best possible solutions to all the problems discovered through iteration and testing.
- Test — to evaluate the products ability to meet the needs of the end-user easily and efficiently.
Audience:
Our project would facilitate quick and easy communication between teachers and their colleagues. It would also connect the user to resources that are typically not conveniently accessible such as testing preparation materials, past lesson plans, and other resources that are usually scattered throughout the school's archives.
The audience for our project would primarily be teachers looking to save time preparing their educational material, communicating with others, and getting feedback to improve their teaching methods.
Assumptions:
As a team, we discussed our assumptions regarding teacher retention rates and why they could be suffering.
- Teachers do not receive enough financial compensation.
- Teachers responsibilities are regularly over-extended.
- Teachers’ mental health affects students.
- Teachers feel responsible for students performance.
User Research:
Once we discussed our assumptions, it was time to begin our research. We crafted interview questions and created an online survey to send to the general public. We started to reach out to people for expert interviews. These expert interviews would be with people that directly related to our subject matter. We interviewed people who are currently teaching and those who have stopped teaching.
“I just graduated with my Master’s in August…If you, as a teacher, want to be paid more, you have to go to school… so I now have $10,000 in student loans and I only got about a $75 pay increase each month.”
“In reality working with adults is sometimes worse than working with children. With children you have control, adults are harder to interact with.”
“[Teachers] don't have any control in their classroom, and we don't get respect outside of the school…”
Through this research, we found that there were a number of factors that contributed to the difficulty of being a teacher.
- Financial Compensation
- Poor communication with administration
- Education is ever-changing, and teachers feel pressured to “re-learn how to teach”
Persona:
Using the data gathered from our impromptu interviews, expert interviews, and our online survey, we created a user persona. Our user persona “Jessica” was an important tool to help our team empathize with our users and their true goals.
Jessica’s Short Term Goals:
- To communicate with other teachers freely.
- To quickly grasp the culture of the school and how it runs.
- To learn who her students are.
- Wants clearly defined responsibilities.
Once we had a clear picture of who we were designing for, it was time to begin designing an experience that would fit her needs.
User Story Mapping:
Once we established our persona, we moved on to our User Story Map. Through the use of post-it notes, we determined the main goals of the user. We then determined the narratives and user tasks required to complete those goals. The dark grey lines in each column represent the “release slice”. Above this slice is our MVP (minimum viable product).
Using the user story map, we noticed our narratives quickly started to revolve around themes of communication. We knew we needed to clarify the methods of which the user could communicate. Having a calendar, bulletin board, and direct messaging have specific uses that have varying levels of privacy.
The user story map also led us to discover that we have supplemental goals that we could not cover in the current scope of the project due to time constraints.
User Flow Map:
After we mapped out how the user could achieve their goals, we started to develop a user flow map to get a general sense of the website's organization and content. From the flow map, we discovered that the experience would be less linear, and more divergent from a central hub of information. We knew from this point that we could lean more towards a dashboard experience.
The user flow map was also a great tool in dividing the workload for the development of the wireframes.
Wireframing:
After creating our user story and flow map, we began to breathe life into all the research we have collected to this point. Using a pen and a sketchbook, I began using the 10x10 method on each frame that we determined in our user flow map.
We started with the mobile wireframes first, to make sure we could include the MVP in that format.
We discussed the possibility of using a bottom navigation bar, however, because of the many different branches of the project, we landed on using a “hamburger” menu to organize the different branches of the mobile website while still being easily accessible.
One of our goal’s while wireframing was to make the tasks as accessible as possible without having too many pages and actions driving the navigation. We felt that if the user wanted to complete a task, they would not want to be slowed down by page after page of links and back buttons.
After our team developed our individual sketches, we then came together and discussed what was most successful and what was least successful. We felt the wireframes that were more successful were those that were clear and concise, with an appropriate amount of white space. We did feel like having a larger header (below) took away valuable real estate that would also make the experience feel more cramped.
After combining our mid-fidelity wireframes, our team was tasked to develop the web version of the project individually. The transition from mobile to web allowed for a slight re-organization of the content, which would make for a more streamlined experience.
At this time, I started thinking about the theme, and how it would appeal to the user.
I decided to keep the logo simple, a script font with the name “Mystro”. The term is a play on conducting many different elements to create harmony. The color scheme is a monochromatic palette with balancing grays.
After the high-fidelity wireframes were complete, I input them into the interactive prototyping tool InVision. Using the prototype, I could clearly communicate the flow and personality of the project.
Next Steps:
Continuing this project, I would reach out to the potential users that we initially interviewed to get some valuable feedback. A specific part of the experience that I would like to get feedback on is the bulletin board. I would like to see different user’s post new events and receive notifications from the new post. It would also be excellent to get feedback on the visual organization of the bulletin board and how those notifications guide the users in responding.
Conclusion:
Our team realized during our user story mapping that we could not cover the scope of the entire project in the given time frame. We would not only need to research, map, and design the teachers side of the project, but also design the administrative and student side. If we had more resources (time, money, people) we would look further into connecting the administration and student side, and possibly explore the integration of parent/teacher communication.
Overall, I feel this project was a success based on user goals that were discovered during our research. With more time, this could be developed into a tool that could address many of the challenges teachers face in their careers and increase their job satisfaction.
