CLIENT

Mondadori Education / Rizzoli
2017

CHALLENGE

Due to a new acquisition, two publishing houses needed to merge their teaching platform into a single one. Aim of the project was the redesign of a digital teaching platform, keeping in mind age diversity, technology affinity, language barriers and accessibility. 

STRATEGY

Make everybody feel safe & confident with the tool. All teachers, digital natives or a little older, deserve the chance to use the platform without feeling in default or in difficulty, embracing technology to help them in their daily activities.

CHANNELS

Responsive website, 
with a focus on tablets.

FEATURES

• Digital classroom

• Interactive Books

• Tests & Homeworks

• Digital tools for creative works and researches

personal notes

I loved all the autonomy and trust I had from the client on this project. This has been a beautiful journey that made me realise how important accessibility is.

Also, simplicity is never enough.

Design Process

Stakeholders were involved since the beginning to identify the main key points and objectives for the project.

Personas definition was crucial in the definition of a solid base for the user experience design.
Yes! We defined personas together with the client.

During the personas creation process, many aspects have been taken in consideration but, in particular, 2 main aspects needed to be addressed:

• DIGITAL PROPENSITY - how much teachers and students were familiar with digital products?

• PROACTIVITY - would they actively use and learn how to use a new digital product to support their teaching activities?

Personas has been thought to cover all 4 areas, to embrace all needs.

Top left quarter: a student who is familiar with digital products, but not proactive at school

Top right quarter: a young teacher, a digital native also happy to learn new tools and techniques to improve her approach at school

Bottom left quarter: a teacher who is not too familiar with digital, but also less interested in changing his well-known approach

Bottom right quarter: a young foreign student, just approaching the digital world and happy to do it

All functionalities and activities have been then mapped using the same logic, to understand where to improve them from a UX perspective:

The process continued with a deep as-is analysis, underlining all weaknesses and strengths — both existing platforms have been analysed to create the application roadmap and understand the MVP.

Also, a new IA has been defined.

Safe and accessible

Accessibility played an important role.

For example, a student with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or dyslexia can benefit more from digital textbooks than from hard copy thanks to the help of support functions such as line-by-line text highlighting and accompanying voice-over in reading.

Being able to listen instead of reading alone represents a great help, as well also highlighting small blocks of text to help identify a focus.

Graphic elements and illustrations help to quickly focus on the sections you want to read, as prompters and spelling correctors help in writing texts.

CONSISTENCY AND DISCOVERY

Talking about the new UX, of course consistency limits the ways of representing similar objects, trying to guarantee users a linear and repetitive experience, ensuring ease of use and learning.

In view of the change of interface, it was important to invest in a modular approach, to guarantee familiarity between users and the platform.

Conventional designs help in this sense, shortening the learning period of users and ensuring more immediate use. However, although it is good practice to maintain consistent structures and macro-patterns of use, fun and discovery are two important factors that aim to create a relationship between users and interfaces, generating trust and propensity to use.

Ideally, an interface offers multiple levels of understanding, from the most obvious and visible to the most hidden but "faster", in order to be able to satisfy and entertain even the most experienced users.

After the definition of the UX Design, we then studied a UI Interface that could suit all the needs and then developed a full HTML prototype, as a platform to collect feedbacks during the design process but also as final delivery for the client.