Google Register — Product Design Exercise
Problem Statement:
At the beginning of each new semester or school year, teachers are faced with the challenge of remembering names for a large number of new students.
Design an experience to help an educator match faces to names, with the goal of shortening the time needed to reach complete un-aided accuracy.
After reading the problem, it was quite clear to instigate the sprint process to solve this problem in an unorthodox way but coincidently following the basic UX Design process. Which involved:
- Understanding
- Research
- Ideating
- Solving
- Measure
Why do teachers need to remember their students? (Product need)
Remembering names is one of the foundations of creating a good impression and lasting relationship with people. Do teachers have a good time remembering them? Well, of course not.
The number of students teachers encounter in every semester or year is extremely cumbersome to keep track of and yet alone remember.
The feature or product that we need to provide has an opportunity as it can increase the scope of teachers having a good relationship with their students, getting reviewed succinctly, and having a good chance of keeping their jobs secure with a little extra accountability.
Which teacher might actually use it? (Potential users)
Since a lot of the documentation and the teaching has been replaced by few digital tools, teachers have constantly been given training and about 68% of teachers are trained and knowledgeable to use these digital tools in their daily work.
Every mainstream job these days requires adequate technical skill, due to various methods of evaluation with the competitiveness in jobs.
Our users can vary from Middle school to Busy University. The data could be validated with a survey and 80% find a requirement of this product ranging from different types of teaching professionals.
A lot of names to remember? (When would they require?)
To understand hypothetically, user stories pave a good path in understanding the needs and create a convincing link for the product need. One of those user stories that were written are:
Framed Problem Statement:
Build a web application for busy lecturers, who are looking to remember their student's names, so that they effectively categorize their names based on their personality and build good relationships with them.
Narrowing it down (Validation)
Validating with quantitative research and secondary research these are the few points:
Target Audience: Experienced teachers with 100–400 student count.
How do they remember their students: Mostly remember them with their deeds and habits more than facial recognition.
What do they use currently to keep track of their students: Excel sheets, Register, and Google classrooms.
After researching with some secondary data and conducting surveys the product validation was quite clear. The next step was to come up with possible solutions from the data.
Generate a game-changing solution for the teachers ( List the ideas)
The best way to get a good solution is to be an idea-generating machine i.e fire ideas like a machine gun. These ideas further need to be prioritized based on the matrix of Impact vs Effort, where impact depends on the parameters like (Reach, Business goals, and User Satisfaction).
Solution
Google classrooms have built a solid foundation providing B2B services to many K-12 institutions and Universities have a good user base and have a good competitive edge.
After narrowing down the needs, adding new features to the feather of google classroom could be a way to solve the existing problem with an existing product.
Introducing Google Register
Prior to digital devices, student accountability was done using registers, this was the only way remarks, test valuation, and other student activities were kept updated by teachers.
Google register is a one-step solution to help teachers keep track of their students, have profound information of who their students are so that teachers can build everlasting relationships with their students.
Identifying the Task requirements:
- Onboard the users to Register from google classrooms.
- Use data from current classrooms or add new classes for the teachers taking classes.
- Show student count and invite students to the respective class using the classroom code or QR.
- List view of the students in each class.
- Filter or sort the students for easier tracking of students.
- Have an option to put remarks and notes. ( extra accountability)
Task Flow
Since our teachers use classrooms in multiple platforms it was intended to create a solution both for web and mobile version to give users enough flexibility while moving around busy lectures, events, and meetings. etc.
Wireframes
Rough wireframes were created to show paramount understanding, vision, and flow to the product.
Designs
The addition of 4 tags is mainly keeping in mind the basic heuristic of Recognition over Recall. Where these colored tags could be easier to recognize the student and reducing the burden to remember names.
4tags is basically to reduce a load of information as the human memory can only accommodate 3–4 items.
Will teachers use it or not is the question? (How we measure it?)
The best way to know whether it has worked or not is setting the KPI’s and analyzing the data based on the NPS score and the number of users engaging with our new feature.
This way we can push certain other features:
- Integrating the assignment or task submission and creating a list view all the assignment submissions of students.
- Include a Cohort feature inside the classes to group students easily, which also allows teachers to easily facilitate the group activities as collaboration is one arising problem when it comes to classroom activities, and tracking them could extensively difficult.
Key Learnings
Since the scope of the project was pretty clear and the teachers usually face this problem.
My key takeaways would be to improvise the user onboarding, as google register would be a new feature and the number of existing users have to find ways to understand the feature, which could prove quite difficult for users.
Rather than it being a burden, the users could find easier ways to remember more than remark tags, as the list of students is high and filtering them would be a risk again based on the different tags that users might give.
Note: This was just a product exercise from my learnings from the book “Solving product design exercises” by Artiom Dashinsky .
Would strongly recommend this, for any designer to understand the true essence of solving problems as a designer and I’m glad to have also subscribed to Artiom’s Newsletter, straight-up receiving these design exercises.
Thank you so much for sticking with me till the end, you’re awesome, would love to get your feedback and connect with you. Do share your thoughts in DM or comments.💭
