Navio is a digital platform that accompanies Macmillan Education’s English language courses for young learners. It makes learning more engaging by game-based language activities.
It provides teachers with a seamless transition between the coursebook and digital teaching activities.
Working as a UX/UI designer in Macmillan Education,
helped me to concentrate on the bigger picture as
well as understand smaller details of the product.
My responsibilities in the team:
Define and design user flows and interactions of new features and activities.
Lead accessibility efforts in the UXD team to encourage more accessible and inclusive design.
Build a responsive layout framework for the next version of the product for small to extra large screens.
Carried concept testing with stakeholders and developers with coded-interactive prototypes.
Navio offers digital experience of the coursebook which comprises of 100’s of activities and comprehensions.
In order to teach effectively in the classroom, the teachers refer to actual book page spreads on an external display screen (projectors, interactive whiteboards, etc.) connected to their laptop or computer.
The customer support had received several usability complaints by the teachers related to zoom interactions on the page faithful view while teaching in the classroom.
Teachers described the feature as "unusable", "difficult to use", "unintuitive", etc.
The solution was designed to make the experience of using zoom interactions on the "book on screen" more intuitive and easier to use.
I took the following contextual issues into account when coming up with the design solution:
With the teachers feedback in hand, I started off by analysing the complaints to understand the pain points. The feature seemed to be "unusable" because of its ambiguous affordances which confused the users.
Zooming interactions were studied across three different types of apps - slack app, google maps and adobe photoshop - to understand the principles, rational and different mental models taken into account while designing these apps.
I worked to analyse the existing design and raised problem areas. After that I created concepts to propose potential micro interactions based on the devices used by our users.
The solution was based on the existing functionality and best practices. The aim was to bridge the gap of gulf of execution and evaluation.
I worked on defining various interactions to make the affordance of zoom intuitive for the users for various devices used by our users.
Communication with the development team helped to raise any technical concerns with the direction we've chosen. Feedback from the developers helped us to iterate and improve our user flow and interactions.
Collaboration with internal and external stakeholders helped to get their early feedback before the actual development and ensured everyone is on the same page.
The high-fidelity prototypes with the documentation were passed to the development team after a series of feedback.
Regular catch-ups with the development team helped to resolve any issues during implementation.
The feature received huge success in the Spain schools. Teachers were highly motivated to use the page faithful view with new zoom features in the classroom.
The process of iterative feedback helped us to save a lot of development time and gave us confidence to validate our concepts and direction. Continuous communication and collaboration between teams ensured design is implemented well and caters edge cases.
Below is a glimpse of other activities which has been a part of my work.
Lead accessiblity efforts in design team and created guidelines which helped the design and content team to install an inclusive design mentality.
These guidelines are shared in the publication UX collective which help designers to build more accessible products.
The next version of Navio aims to cover small to extra large screens. The responsive ecosystem was built which comprised of responsive grids and layouts, responsive typography and uniform spacing. .
Worked on designing new activities for the pre-primary students to ensure learning becomes enjoyable.
