A product manager and I interviewed teachers who were seasoned in virtually learning as well as teachers who were new to teaching online due to the impacts of COVID-19. We used a script to guide our conversations and sat in on classes, jotting down insights.

Trello board of key insights that informed feature development

ChalkCast was meant to service three users; teachers, students, and administrators who had control over what digital products were bein used for remote learning.

When choosing problems to address, I work with my team to answer the following questions:

• How pervasive is the problem?
• How impactful on the user experience is it?
• How well positioned is our business to address it?
• How well do we understand the problem?

Reviewing our notes, we were able to identify pain points that were frequently mentioned by multiple educators and students. These frustrations were the basis of our ideating session on how we could build a better video conferencing experience.

From speaking with teachers, it was clear that students were not prepared to handle their own controls, such as muting themselves.

In order to minimize distractions, we added heightened controls for the teacher. This meant the teacher could mute-unmute student’s mics, hide student’s video, and stop-then-restrict a student from sharing their screen.

We also had to add a number of permissions so that users who were teachers could be identified and only invited users could join a classroom. These lead to less distractions and avoiding the dreaded “zoom bombing.”

Wireframe of a standard session from a teacher's perspective

Breakout groups left much to be desired in other video conferencing platforms. Once breakout groups were initiated, users were automatically placed in a call that had a subset of guests. The experience felt very isolating from the rest of the call and the teacher could only be see and hear to one group at a time.

We developed a breakout group experience where a teacher could see all students at once, and by hovering over the group, a teacher could listen in on the conversation. Students were always able to see their teacher, and if they clicked a “Raise hand” button, it would notify the teacher that someone in that group needed help.

For the more relaxed teachers, we added a setting where students were free to move from group to group on their own.

Wireframe of a teacher building and launching breakout groups

Teachers felt taking attendance was a time sink given it was hard to quickly find the student in the grid in the virtual classroom.

We implemented an automatic attendance taker and an “assigned seat” interface. Because only invited users are allowed to join their ChalkCast room, the system would be able to identify who was invited but absent in the room and assign all users a place on the grid.

The assigned seat feature also helped teachers locate students they were speaking with, which made them feel a little more connected to their classroom.

Wireframe of an attendance interface, where teachers can see how long a guest was in their room

While some user interviews were generalized to understand pain points, specific features were also researched and tested, such as a quiz feature. By identifying the key insights from user interviews about an in-app quiz, I was able to identify the ideal attributes. I could further synthesize the data and group findings in an affinity map.

Affinity mapping around a potential quiz feature based on teacher-persona interviews

Brainstorming with the the internal team meant we could collaborate early while choosing features to develop. This was essential in getting design-product-development buy-in, as each team brought in their unique expertise.

Mapping value compared to effort for a dashboard interface

ChalkCast teamed up with a school in Colorado to test product stability and student engagement. Students favored seeing their teacher regardless of what breakout group they were in. Teachers were fond of the automated attendance reports and that multiple participants could share their screen at once. However, Lively Video sunsetted the product in late 2022.

This product challenged me to understand what it means to build a user-centric tool. I had to reject some assumptions about education and meaningful learning just because I was once a student. We recruited and retained students and educators that allowed us to sit-in on classes, building our data and understanding the complex problems around online learning. This led to both a stronger product and me emerging as a more empathetic designer, solving problems the right way.