My Roles

• UX Designer

• UX Researcher

• UI Designer
  

Overview 

Cultivate is a web-based community platform for educators to learn and grow. It’s a professional resource where teachers can explore approaches and directions. Most importantly they can connect to niche industry experts who can help them grow their practice. In anticipation of their upcoming website launch, our team evaluated the prelaunch Cultivate website.

Primary Users

• K-12 Educators: Cultivators

  • Looking to advance their practice in a variety of ways and in a variety of topic areas.

• Expert educators: Lead Cultivators

  • Looking to serve other educators through professional training opportunities.

Methodology

Cognitive Walkthrough

Was used to test the usability of primary tasks for Cultivators and Lead Cultivators.

Contextual Inquiry

Was utilized in research sessions on Zoom with potential Cultivator participants to evaluate the platform in the context of their day-to-day lives as teachers. Using these insights we created an interactive web prototype.  

Prototype Plan

Research was synthesized into meaningful insights. Educator participants that we evaluated explained that to truly grow as teachers what they need most is flexibility. Sharing flexible teaching approaches of all kinds is essential for helping teachers reach the broadest spectrum of students in an ever changing in the world. Their search for resources is an unending maze of digital platforms and social media. Resources for educators exist in a wide variety of mediums, including: documents, images, videos, audio files, etc. Participants were excited to see that Cultivate would be a resource sharing tool specifically for teachers where everything could be gathered and shared on one platform.

A Noteworthy Complaint:

Potential Cultivators wanted the ability to upload and share their own resources.

Restricting that ability to Lead Cultivators alone was counter intuitive to educators who learn by sharing with each other on a regular basis. Our team focused on this discovery which led to an exciting addition to the platform, the ability for any level of Cultivator to upload. Creating an Upload area, with simple media recorders, and the ability to share a large variety of formats adds a new dynamic layer to the entire experience.

Prototype Focus Areas

In our research sessions we learned that educators need flexibility to be at their best. For our prototype our team focused on two main additions to the platform:

• Search filters

  • To sifting through a broader range of topics

• A new personal Uploads area for all Cultivator levels

  • Giving universal ability to upload and share a variety of file formats that range from movies 
to simple documents

Wireframes

Rough sketched wireframes were created to determine optimal locations of the new Uploads area and also to begin designs on a simple video and audio recorder that would allow users to directly import recorded session into the Cultivate web platform to share.

Interactive Prototype Tour

An interactive prototype was created for Cultivate stakeholders featuring the chosen focus areas.

Outcomes & Lessons

Potential Cultivators who evaluated the Cultivate web platform were enthusiastic about the possibilities a focused teaching community resource could provide. There was only one complaint, they wanted the ability to upload and share their own resources. Restricting that ability to Lead Cultivators alone was counter intuitive to educators who learn by sharing with each other on a regular basis. Our team focused on this discovery which led to an exciting addition to the platform, the ability for any level of Cultivator to Upload. We added an Upload area, with simple media recorders, and the ability to share a large variety of formats.