Digitizing the traditional paper assignment
Qwickly Jot
Role
Overview
Product Experience Designer & Education Specialist, Qwickly
User research, UX & UI design, product management, quality assurance, product education
Spring 2021 - Fall 2021
More than ever before, students and teachers are relying on digital tools to facilitate learning and complete coursework. As a leading educational software company that provides enhancements to learning management systems, Qwickly wanted to create a product that would digitize the traditional paper assignment and integrate seamlessly with existing learning management systems.
Problem
Traditional paper assignments are incompatible with remote learning.
How might we make it easier for teachers to create, assign, and view completed digital assignments?
How might we make it easier for students to view and complete digital assignments?
Design
We began with a simple MVP for our two groups of users: instructors and students.
Instructor Task Flow
From their learning management system, an instructor creates a new Qwickly Jot assignment and chooses an image to use as the assignment “template.” They publish this assignment to make it available for students.
Student Task Flow
As a student, the user opens a course within their learning management system and launches the Qwickly Jot assignment their instructor created. They draw directly on the picture using their finger, mouse, or stylus to complete the assignment, then submit their work. The instructor can then view their submission and grade it.
Once this MVP was established, we got to work adding features.
As an instructor:
The ability to define an assignment title, instructions, and the number of attempts allowed per student
The ability to upload a PDF in addition to a .png or .jpg
The ability to choose a pre-created template instead of uploading an image
The ability for an instructor to leave feedback for a student on an assignment
The option to include a text field in the assignment in addition to the file/template chosen
As a student:
The ability to view the assignment title, instructions, the number of attempts allowed, and the number of the attempt they are currently on
The ability to view your assignment submission(s), in either a list or grid
Example of an instructor using Qwickly Jot to create an assignment.
Testing
Since this is a new product offering, I wanted to make sure we gathered as much user feedback as possible. I created a brief user survey and a feedback mechanism within the product to nudge instructors to provide feedback on their experience with the product, and with managing digital assignments in general. This feedback will help inform future product development and ensure we catch trouble areas quickly.
One trouble area we learned of upon testing the product with a small group of users had to do with the assignment image size. We had originally designed the product to essentially revolve around a rectangular “workspace” in the center of the page. When instructors were viewing student submissions, they had the ability to click on an image to launch it in fullscreen, then click to go back to the original “workspace” view.
While this worked fine for instructors who created assignments with rectangular images, it proved to be frustrating for instructors who created assignments with long, vertical images. Those users found themselves constantly having to click back and forth to view every submission in full screen just to make the image readable.
Taking this feedback into consideration, we decided to remove the adapt the shape and size of the “workspace” to render whatever image is chosen at 100% scale. This made it easier for both users to view a given assignment and eliminated the need to toggle to full scale.
Retrospective
This new product offering is still in its earliest stages, but I am excited for all the improvements we have planned (the ability to download a submission and the ability to create a multi-page assignment, to name a few) as well as the improvements we have yet to think up. As we gather user feedback, we will continue to build out this product’s offerings and to make improvements to existing features as needed.
You can learn more about Qwickly Jot here - https://www.goqwickly.com/jot/