Dave Kelly

Project Overview

The Problem: 

The new driving force of the Irish economy is based on "born on the internet" companies. According to IDA Ireland, 16 of the top 20 global software companies have their European headquarters located in Ireland. The continued success of these global companies operating in Ireland will depend on the what kind of talent they can attract to their organisations form the Irish workforce. This talent needs to comprise of developers, designers, sales and internal operations staff to name but a few, but one common trait these people must share in order for the company to have success is that they must be problem solvers. Problem solvers who are not only capable of solving problems, but capable of creating problems to solve too. Codeucate has been created to up-skill those problem solvers from an early age.

The Solution:

Codeucate is a company that has developed an online teaching and learning platform to make the teaching and learning of computer programming (coding) available in a teacher-friendly and pupil-friendly way to children in Irish schools, the United Kingdom and beyond. Coupled with the teaching and learning aspect is a unique pupil-progress tracker that gives immediate feedback to the class teacher and other invested parties.

My Role :

User Research, Personas, User Journey, Information Architecture, User Flow, Wireframes & User Testing. 

Tools: 

Sketch [wireframes & medium fidelity mockups]

Discovery

Profile of Competitors

Codeucate is firmly committed to working with all competitors where possible. 

Personas

Having identified early on that we were going to focus on teachers, it wasn't until we visit a major event that we identified the potential large market for parents. We made the decision to design with both potential users in minds.  

User Journey

Using Aideen and Martin I mapped a behavioural flow of how they might interact with the platform. Understanding the users’ decision making and flow allowed me to brainstorm the necessary features and opportunities required for students to successfully learn using Codeucate.

Content and Information Architecture

Page Descriptions and Screen Levels

I mocked up with page descriptions and screen levels to show intedend interaction and discovarbility of the platform

Wire Frames & Mockups

In conjunction with the UI process, at this stage in the project I will have identified a lot of components and started to iterate through various possible styles. I find this makes the wire framing process more visual and gives your project a clearer end style. 

Our first release of this product was to a small user group who provided feedback that allowed us to make small iterative adjustments to both the UI look and fell but also to it's functionality. 

User Testing

To validate our design decisions we used a typical school of our desired target market to test our platform. We shadowed users, observed their usage and interaction with the UI, received feedback and took notes of the entire lesson and how it ran outside of just using computers. 

logging in was initially seen as a blocker, and consider that the average time a teacher has for this subject is 40 minutes, we took away that we had to make this process more seamless. As the children collaborated on coding objectives the noise level in the room increased so the addition of some content that requires headphones was seen as a way to placate the users. 

The teacher was eager to see who was where as it was impossible for her to be keeping an eye on all 15 laptops and iPads simultaneously for this reason we took away that a quick view for the teacher and the functionality to put all of her class on her desired screen was also taken away from this. 

Key Learnings

• Taking the time to empathize with users helps with understanding and identifying the context, emotions, goals, and motivations that affects a user’s interaction with a product. This is a core value that must be carried over throughout an entire project cycle from discovery to design iteration. 

• Establishing a clear vision and mission statement helps ground a project and keeps focus on the development process of an app.