Designing a Curriculum for First Generation College Students
Prototyping and launching a brand new product to help 6-12th grade first generation students consider and apply to college after high school.
Background
Challenge
How might we help more first generation students get to college?
The Skills Required
Facilitation
Information Architecture
Prototyping
YAML
Design in Agile Teams
Interaction Design
UI Design
The Team
Product Manager
Design Director
UI Engineer
Backend Engineer
Software Architecture
Curriculum Specialist
The Timeline
Person 1
Person 2
Person 3
Outcomes
Improve college application rates for first generation students.
Help students feel like college is possible for them.
Became fastest selling new product in company history.
Story
The goal of our small product squad was to create a product that could support our first generation college students as they explore possibilities for their future starting in grade 6, learn about college, and ultimately go through the college application process as seniors.
1. Personas
Our core persona was a first generation student who had potential to go to college, but had no idea where to start. This was a persona that resonated not just with our product squad, but throughout the company. He continued to evolve as student technology habits changed for students like him.
I came on board after the creation of our persona, a first generation college student that the entire team came to support. This persona was formed from a combination of client, stakeholder, and secondary research. Their needs were seen as a new business opportunity and the first change to reimagine college and career readiness.
4. Lesson Activity Prototyping
As the Curriculum Specialist did research and work to build out our lessons for the first grade level, I leveraged my knowledge of classroom “Chart paper” techniques and knowledge checks to wireframe and pitch potential lesson interactions. These became interactive prototypes using a tool called Just in Mind. We leveraged this tool to iron our issues with drag and drop and other elements as we worked with our video production partner to plan out student testing.
7. Desirability Testing
I took the style tiles I created and partnered with our user researched to moderate a desirability test I’d planned. Students selected the acronyms that best matched to the style tiles and then provided additional feedback on them. The style tile that to them resonated as “sophisticated” won out - our students in the test wanted to be treated like young adults capable of making big decisions and wanted their UI to reflect this. They also adored bold colors that let them stand out as the next generation.
10. Launch
It was exciting to launch this product. We built out the rest of the 6-12 Curriculum using reusable lesson templates and activities. Ultimately, the product was united with the our K-12 flagship as an additional offering. Our team had tried many new ways of working - many of which are now industry best practices - and we ultimately moved to other teams to help distribute our learnings and coach our new teammates.
2. Storyboarding
After joining I helped to create a storyboard containing the story of this persona so that our product manager could validate the narrative we were working to impact. This also helped her speak to the business about the work we were doing, since this was in an internal incubator space.
That storyboard evolved, with our findings, into a visual vision of the story of our persona with this product and the goals he was able to achieve in high school.
5. Student Testing of Concepts and Paper Prototypes
In preparation for student testing, I created those prototypes, a number of conceptual designs, mood boards, and even a paper prototype that turned into a stop motion type video of a kind of “game like” main interface where the student could travel and discover lessons. We flew out to our partners to collaborate and test with students. Some ideas hit the mark better than others - and our risky paper prototype was a little too much for students, who wanted to be seen as more mature.
8. Building in Partnership
From there we built out one grade of the curriculum. I paired frequently with the front end developer as we figured out how to make things really work. Just in Mind could take some time to prototype, Invision was in its early phases, so there was a lot of “figuring out the design” together. I put in my fair share of lesson content using YAML as our rudimentary content management system. During this time our PM was working on some elements of product-market fit and trying to figure out if we could build partnerships that allowed us to stand this up as a new flagship or if we’d ultimately join the product into our existing K-12 flagship ecosystem. We worked in parallel.
3. User Story Mapping
Next the team worked together to create our first story map. This was my first taste of collaboration within a fully immersed product team - we built out story maps based on our knowledge and assumptions about the student, teacher, and principal persona. This became the tool we use to identify our minimum viable product and first prototypes - which were lesson interactions.
I am a strong advocate for this method as a thinking and product/backlog visualization tool for PM, PD and tech lead trios and agile teams to this day.
6. UI Pivot
We took those findings to shift the UI back to something more traditional, keeping some interesting features but leaving our paper “lesson city” behind. I created new prototypes and style tiles in order to test further what students really expected out of the emotional feel of the UI. Meanwhile, our front end developer partnered with me to begin building out activities and lesson templates by modifying the Zurb Foundation framework - an early effort to think modular about the product.
9. Pilot
One of our local schools was willing to pilot the curriculum product with us. We spent many wonderful weeks in the school, facilitating lesson plans created by our curriculum team members, listening to students, and observing them use our product. The entire team rotated in and out of this “get outside the building experience.” We were often able to take findings right back to our backlog and make adjustments, especially since our team was working using a Kanban to maximize our flexibility for pivots.
Learnings
Balance Student Centric with the Rest of the Education Ecosystem
This product was truly student centric. However, we missed some of the ecosystem needs of teachers, counselors, and institutions and could have taken opportunities to reduce risk in those areas with experiments before product launch or quickly after launch. I wish our team had been prepped to take an ecosystem look at our assumptions so we could have more readily balanced student needs with institutional needs. I credit this learning for driving me to explore what is know today as service design.
Product Squads with Shared Context are Amazing
I reflect fondly on this team so much because of the shared context we all built together around this product. There were no true handoffs - we were story mapping, storyboarding, prototyping, learning and gathering insights together. I advocate for product teams to do their best to start together - PM, PD, Engineering and the other roles that make up your squad.
Research Ops Is Important
I still can’t get over how challenging it was to set up student sessions to learn with our prototypes. At the time there was no notion of research operations and having someone to help manage a process of recruitment, consent, scheduling, and those administrative aspects of discovery work, not to mention methods, discussion guides, moderator preparation, and site preparation. This sometimes invisible work is critical to the success of research and discovery.