Improving communication with the Notification Central
FTD, Accenture
Overview
Iônica is a CMS educational platform created to help students having better remote classes and helping schools to be more strategical with the students’ learning.
Year
2021
Goals
Increasing awareness for new features launched in the platform.
Improving the UX of the platform
Roles
Lead Design end-to-end
Platform
Web Desktop and mobile
The Problem
After iônica's launch in schools, the team started collecting feedback from the users and one of the main complaints was about not having a way to communicate special events on the platform, such as exercise reviews, grades, and posts on the wall.
To solve this issue, users were using Google Meet’s features but not all teachers could use it since most of them are unfamiliar with digital tools.
From the business perspective, the platform was growing and there was an urge to communicate new releases quickly and uncomplicatedly.
Users Profiles and Jobs to be Done
Iônica already had well-designed users personas but for this feature, I decided to build specific profiles that combined with the Jobs To Be Done methodology would help me organize, document, and have a dedicated perception of user's needs.
Mapping notification's needed
After defining the JBTD and interviewing stakeholders from different schools, we defined a notification map that showed the main needs users had in the platform.
From that point, I partnered with Product and prioritized the most important notifications.
Exploring Interactions
With the main scope of the project defined, I started studying how notifications worked on different scenarios.
Ideation
This part of the process helped me raising more questions about the solution such as would it make sense for students and teachers being able to mark all notifications as read? For how long would we keep the notifications on the notification central and etc.
Solution Design
For this project I decided to already test with the final solution. I believe wireframes are a very powerful tool to get early validation but on this project they would already be the final solution. For this, I chose to sketch my first ideas on paper and then go to the solution for testing.
Usability Testing
The main goal of the Usability Test was to validate that the user experience fulfilled the JBTDs and that the users could find the notification central. For that, I decided to run an unmoderated usability test with a follow-up survey targeting specific schools.
Some of the tasks we explored on this UT were:
”Check for notifications on the platform”
”Access the last notification you received”
”Change the settings of the last notification you received”
Learnings from UT
Around 15 users considering students and teachers took the test which led us to some insights:
Good findability was reached, users could locate and interact with the notifications central
Having only an icon for the settings wasn't enough for some teachers to find it, only 60% of the sample completed the task and they were students.
Push notifications were the least favorite go for options for users - we explored this question on the follow-up questionnaire which led us to deprioritize this option on launch.
Learnings from the project
Aligning and prioritizing:
Aligning with stakeholders was primordial for this solution since there were a lot of use cases we weren't aware of, but on the other side prioritising the most important notifications also helped reassuring productivity and defining the MVP.
Mapping skills
A notification central may seem an overly simple solution but it required a good work on mapping and defining the messages that are going to be shown for each profile. Thinking about the amount of characters and the features that are must be for notifications according to our product's context was also challenging since there is a lot of information and reference about the Theme out there.
