User data to improve engagement

Context

An EdTech company with a content platform for teachers and students, where a core job for teachers was assigning articles to students. In this project,

My most impactful contribution: I applied UX principles, content guidelines, and user data to elevate content. The result achieved positive user feedback and improved performance.

Problem

Low engagement with assignment form ”They (teachers) are looking for assignments that can be highly customized and easily integrate into their current classroom assignment flow” - Assignment Flow UXR Study

Goals

Users: Assign content to teach a subject or work on reading skills.

Business: Increase form engagement to increase user retention.

Design: Increase engagement by making assignments more customizable and boosting user confidence.

Step 1: Apply UX principles and content guidelines

Skill: Analyze existing content, revise content flow Outcome: Completed prototype

Before: without content input

Revisions

New placement and label of a toggle switch and removal of the banner. The banner was an inappropriate component that broke an existing pattern.
Add a form title for context and scannability.
Change input field labels to verb phrases instead of nouns. The intent was to inspire action while drawing a clear distinction between the form and the article below.

After: with content revisions

Step 2: Gather insights

Skills: Formulating research questions, collaborating and interpreting results

Study Insights: We learned that users had no trouble with most of the input fields but were confused about dates. Specifically, the purpose of the “Assign on” field was unclear.

Competitor Research Insights:

Some competitors labeled this field with “assign,” while others used “start date.”
One competitor placed the date pickers horizontally (side by side).

Step 3: Apply insights to form field labels

Skills: Use insights to inform design decisions and increase user confidence

New and improved prototype iteration for live testing

Revisions

Crafted body text to address a user concern from research: “Can students still access activities after the due date passes?”
Grouped dates horizontally to indicate a date range
Changed the “Assign on” label to “Start date,” which supports the idea that the first date is the beginning of a time period.

Step 4: Test prototype and synthesize data

Role: Create new study questions for 2nd round of user interviews and interpret quantitative results from the release to 20% of users.

Results

The prototype performed better than the control (completion rates). We would be releasing the prototype to all users.
Low usage rates of the due date feature. However, teachers reported believing that such a feature is valuable.
Less confusion around the “Start date / Assign on” label.

💡

New constraint: Due to engineering constraints, we could not implement the due date feature right away.

Step 5: Pivot! Iterate on date label.

Skills: Pivot to accommodate new constraint

Revision

I quickly researched again what competitors do in this situation and then selected a suggestion from an engineer, which was “Schedule for later.” It was the best option because it accurately describes user intent and is scannable.

Wrap up

What I learned

User behavior is often different than expected.
You cant always solve everything all at once.
Some of the branded terms are unclear and required user-education or revision.

Next steps

We would also need to revisit the due date on the form. We were in the process of uncovering why setting dates was not popular. One hypothesis is that integrated learning management systems (LMSs) are used for scheduling assignments. More research was needed. Additionally, I planned to work with UXR to set up an experiment to specifically test a term. It was evident that users were confused by this term.