Data Derived Goals
My main takeaway for the UX was to streamline the options by cutting extraneous features that were not being used by students. In addition, this streamlining would continue to the student’s quiz performance, in a more intuitive and helpful way.
The main feature updates for the new Quiz Creation tool would be to feed question difficulties adaptively, provide clear and understandable data of weak areas, and be responsive on all devices.
Problem
The interface and flow for the company’s custom quiz generator was very dated and needing an overhaul. It didn’t work well on mobile, the experience was very “pinch and zoom.”
Discovery Phase
Research and user testing was conducted on accounting students. Account representatives or “Personal Coaches” were interviewed as well. While the interface was the main problem, many product features needed re-examination, including: the customization options, granulation of performance, immediate feedback, review modes and custom filters. I determined that performance and statistics were a focus topic as well, since the exploratory research indicated that students didn’t fully understand or take into consideration their quiz performances currently showed to them.
The paper prototypes were created to exemplify the simplified flow and updated interface for the quiz and customizable options page.
Features that were not used frequently by users were partitioned into less visible parts of the quiz’s interface as to not take up valuable real estate. For example, a main problem I noticed was that tools like the “question properties” or “calculator tool” were proximal to common buttons like “grade quiz,” “pause” or “discard.” Users would click these accidentally trying to reach the common buttons and became frustrated.
I have a lot of empathy for the users in these situations and I communicated this to the product owners and developers when advocating for the improvements. It is already hard enough, studying for an accounting certification, thus when the interface fails you – it becomes extremely frustrating.
There were too many steps and extraneous options in the original quiz creator. From interviews with both users and personal coaches* some of these customization options were not only ignored, but some joked about as being useless or confusing. Further research with product owners indicated that these additional options were for niche customers. After meeting with an IT project manager, it turned out these niche customers had different account levels, so we could tailor the features to their specific needs.
With the product manager, I charted and organized all the account levels, their features, and their customers. For instance higher level accounts were professors or flight schools, whereas more common accounts were student accounts.
This created a streamlined and easy way to understand the quiz creator. I also arranged options intuitively so students could create quizzes faster.
*Personal Coaches were account reps that were assigned to each customer after they purchased a review course. These Personal Coaches worked closely with customers to help them setup their study plans, provide motivation and assist with other needs that arose from a customer..
As mentioned in the other parts of this project, I advocated for the removal of extraneous options that were not used or even understood by users. I also grouped the commonly used elements in more visible places.
The quiz interface was similar in layout to the original, given that a fair number of long-time users would be continuing to use the tool, especially professors creating quizzes for their college students. There were many infractions to Fitt’s Law that were corrected in the updated interface. For example, buttons were updated to prevent common user errors like incorrect clicks and other elements being too hard to click.
The interface was also made more ADA/Accessibility friendly with larger text and buttons, higher color contrast, clear section delineations/tags, better keyboard navigation, a layout digestible to screen readers and animated cues.
The Personal Coaches informed me that users did not properly use this aspect of the tool and mostly ignored it. During the interviews they were vocal about this untapped potential of their student’s testing data.
I wanted to simplify this portion of the tool to be more useful and not so overwhelming for the users. Hopefully giving them input they could digest and therefore tailor their studies by identifying their weak areas.
Gleim Publications develops and distributes study and reference materials to help customers learn and understand Accounting and Aviation. Their mission is to maximize knowledge transfer while minimizing your time, frustration, and cost. They provide to accountants and pilots with easy-to-use, effective knowledge transfer systems. This stems from the company’s founder, Dr. Irvin Gleim (a prolific Professor of Accounting at University of Florida) having a passion for both accounting and aviation. He leveraged his self-study products to include pilot training as well.
