Certification Features for Educators

The Certification Features were designed for a web application/user portal. Upon deployment, the certification features successfully increased the conversion rate by 95.7%, empowering users to submit professional development assignments through simplified user flows and clear, responsive progress tracking.

Project Overview

Project Coordinator, UX Research, UX Design, User Acceptance Testing

Roles:

Timeline:

Eight months

Figma, Salesforce, Sandbox Environment, and QA environment, Lyssna user testing, and Google Workspace

Tools:

Feature Highlight

This is an extensive project and there are several important features that were designed for the Certification Module of the CT Portal. Below is the highlights of one feature where I lead the ux design.

Consulting Teacher (CT) Goals

Consulting Teachers collect certification points over the course of three (initial) or five (renewal) years in accordance with their certification cycle. The CTs are awarded points from completed assignments and professional development. The CTs need to complete assignments with ease. They want choice in their learning and structures that nurture their iterative teaching practices.

Front end user

Stakeholder Goals

Stakeholders are the administrators and staff who develop, maintain, and review all assignments. The CT pool includes 173 people. Admin need a simple method to develop engaging assignments for a multitude of learners.

The Director of Certification requested to develop open-ended assignments that CTs can complete multiple times. These recurrent assignments save Admin time and provide CTs with flexibility in their learning.

Back end user

Salesforce Admin

Admin distinguish an assignment as recurrent by using a checkbox on the assignment modal in Salesforce. This provides admin the flexibility to make some, but not all, assignments as recurrent.

Consulting Teachers

CTs self-select the assignments that interest them from the certification renewal choice board. The first iteration of a recurrent assignment can be completed and submitted for approval.

Once a recurrent assignment is selected, the title changes to “Assignment Name 1” so the CT can track their work order.

Salesforce Admin

After reviewing the content, an admin will mark an assignment as approved in Salesforce.

Once their assignment is approved, the CT has the option to select the assignment again to complete another version of the open-ended assignment. This “select again” button duplicates the assignment card without any action needed from the back end user in Salesforce.

Consulting Teachers

Background

The Consulting Teachers (CTs) are per diem consultants who provide SEL strategies and services to educators in a global capacity. To ensure the integrity of the work, CTs are required to maintain their certification with the non-profit.

We set out to create a CT Portal with a certification feature. We built this portal through Salesforce, our organization’s main database, to streamline certification processes for both the Consulting Teachers and administrators at the non-profit.

User Goals

User Persona

User Flow

Two user flows were required to design the interaction. We needed to visualize this process in Salesforce (back end) and the CT Portal (front end) to ensure that the feature would be feasible. Essentially, the user flows accounted for both the design and engineering of this feature.

The back end interaction, in Salesforce, provides Salesforce Admin with the option to choose which certification assignments are recurrent. This step was crucial create the flexibility for some assignments to be recurrent, but not all.

The front end interaction, on the CT Portal, allows users to complete a certification assignment. Once the assignment is approved the user can “Select Again” to duplicate the assignment to the choice board. At that time the user can complete the assignment again. This button keeps choice based learning in the hand of the CT by providing the option to complete multiple versions of an assignment while also preventing a cluttered choice board with unnecessary assignments for CTs who only wish to complete it once or not at all.

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Reflection

Growth Opportunities

My role on this project required me to work with external contractors, this dynamic taught me a lot about:

  • Advocating for the users and their experiences. The empathizing portion of a project is always important, but truly critical when working with developers external to a company. When this occurs, a developer is working to build the product and understand the company mission and vision. My role as a Project Coordinator, and at times ux designer, was critical in bridging our worlds.

  • Define project requirements and project scope in a manner that is highly considered and crystal clear. Research, definitions and thorough requirements are essential to a project’s timeline and success.

Fruits of Labor

I learned so much on this project and it has shaped the way I design.

  • The CT Portal is an extension of Salesforce. Everything I designed for this project had to consider both the back end and front end interactions simultaneously. This expanded my understanding of ux design to include the engineering that supports a user flow.

  • For a piece of data or an interaction to take place for users, there needs to be a place for that data to exist and be stored.

  • Designing for SaaS is fun!