AZURE FOR EDUCATION

PROBLEM

Existing classroom/lab set up and management process was lengthy, convoluted and inadequate for the educators' needs as it didn't provide enough credit/budget information about the students subscriptions. The overall experience and process needs to be simplified to increase efficiency, reduce the number of support tickets and aid in the success of future vision projects that could expand this programs’ reach to many other universities and bring in more revenue.

SOLUTION

PRODUCT GOAL

• See an increase in digital engagement and improvement in overall satisfaction

• Modernize credit management for educators and students leading to unification of e2e experience into Azure platform

• Set a baseline for the experience that can help measure future performances

SUCCESS METRICS

• Improved CSAT score

RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

What do I need to know?

In order to understand the scope of work to be done here, I first dived deep to assess the current experience and the problems, learn more about the users before embarking on how to sol them.

Heuristic evaluation of existing prototype

How does the current experience fail our users? Which flows slow them down? Do they understand all options available to them? Are there alternate options?

To find answers to these questions, I did a thorough audit of the Classroom management flow using NN’s 10 principles. I used my judgement and marked areas we need to further look into.

Our users - who are they?

All this work helped me get more acquainted with the users behavior and goals. I went ahead and created personas for each of them that would anchor all of us and not deviate from these goals throughout the project.

DEFINE

Brainstorm

In our bi-weekly syncs, I shared my findings so far, and roped them into a collaborative session of brainstorming for these HMWs. We used Figjam and all put stickies after which I delved deeper into the suggestions.

How can we help the user achieve their final goal/Scoping?

Designing an experience to deliver value requires us to think what our users are trying to accomplish, what is important to them, and what barriers they may face. Listing down all potential features and creating user flows on this basis are an effective way to find answers to each of these questions.

However, considering the timelines, it was essential to prioritize them to define the scope for the Pilot release. We discussed the impact and effort for the features with all stakeholders and marked them accordingly.

User Flow

In order to find the optimal path and deliver the experience our users deserve, I charted the user flows to help with a bird’s eye view of how I need to layout the elements and actions.

IDEATE & PROTOTYPE

Design system

Azure has an established design system with ample guidance making it easy for anyone to adapt it easily into their process. It sped up my work tremendously and I was able to iterate and share at a fast pace.

Design feedback

These design feedback sessions immensely helped with the multiple iterations and arriving at the version that was ready to be tested by our users.

I had weekly syncs with the product team (Product Owner,PMs, engineers), where I shared the ongoing work and explained rationale behind those designs, took in their feedback, explored alternatives in some cases and reached agreements on what is feasible - both technically and from management perspective.

In addition to product team, I also presented my work to other designers within my team and Azure studio, and received some valuable inputs and ideas that prompted me to spin better design flows and closer adherence to the design system.

For instance, for the step of adding students to a lab via the roster flow method, I went though multiple iterations as shown

In this way, I evaluated the feedback received and applied what helped ease the users journey, drew inspiration from other Azure services and created a prototype for usability testing.

TEST & ITERATE

What do the users feel about the new experience?

So with this redesign that involved redefining the process and flow, aligning with Azure patterns, and utilizing the existing capabilities on Azure Cost management with its powerful analytical reports on the same platform as EduHub, we were successful in our goal of providing an improved and more powerful experience to all our users.

The interview synthesis gave us insights on what needs to be worked upon. Due to deadlines for the pilot release, not all findings could be incorporated right away. Instead, we segregated the recommendations into 2 categories - ‘Fix for pilot’ and ‘Fix later’. Factors influencing our decision making were - how this improvement impacts the user experience, what alternatives do they have if not implemented, development effort required and how well it aligns with the product’s future. I later worked with the PM team in discussing the strategy and creating the roadmap .

Areas of scope for improvements -

• Messaging (Fix for pilot)

• Hierarchy of information (Fix for pilot)

• Credits allocation confirmation (Fix for pilot)

• Ability to exempt Teaching administrators from the Student list (For later)

• Fixing the errors on the uploaded roster file real-time (For later)

• All alerts on home page (For later)

It also re-validated how critical credit management was for them

• All unanimously agreed that seeing the student cost details in Azure cost management addresses their major concern.

And provided valuable insights into the features they wish to have, and what they like in our competitors GCP and AWS

Quotes from customers

This is great, super clean and I love the alerting.

I am guessing the roster file format should be .csv, or .txt, or .xls. Maybe if I download the sample file, I’d know for sure.

I may use the pricing calculator, but I didn’t notice it while creating the lab

I think I understand how the $142.00 per user is calculated but am not 100% sure unless I use my calculator.

What we shipped?

Final designs for the pilot was available to ~20 professors in August 2021 and the GA release was in Jan 2022. The labs are usually set up per semester, so we knew there wouldn’t be lot of traffic immediately after launch to gather feedback . After few months, the team had couple of sessions with the educators to understand how this new experience is working for them and gathered insights.

In addition to some features that we were already working on, a couple of new ones came up like TA and Educator having access to their own view as well as a student view, which we intended to research into further and then propose the design based on the outcome.

Back in August 2021, I also created the presentation for the Product team to use in their read-out about work in the Education space to the EVP of Microsoft.

Final designs

Create flow - Before (there were a total of 5 screens to navigate before this flow was complete!)

Create flow - After (2 screens only plus an optional screen that can be easily bypassed)

CHALLENGES & TAKEAWAYS

Working in a design mature organization doesn’t mean all teams have the same level of maturity and understanding of the design process. It was up to me to establish the design process here, and figure how best to partner with the stakeholders in the team and have them join this journey with me to find the best possible experience for the product. Overall, it was an interesting challenge to solve and am excited as this is the foundation on top of which a lot more features are been added.

Some takeaways -

• Meet the engineers where they are : It’s important to identify their understanding of design, deliverables and design tools. This will ensure we speak the same language, and establish some agreed upon guidelines for developer hand off. In order to make this collaboration smoother, I created and shared educational material on how to use Figma.

• Pushing boundaries of the design system : It goes without saying a design system accelerates the process tremendously while bringing in consistency to our designs and increasing the familiarity for our users. However, there are times when it may not solve our problem most effectively and we may need to explore the best alternative, find related implementation(if possible) that can help with the development effort, have discussions with framework teams and deviate as needed.

• Research participants : Gathering & scheduling research participants, especially for niche enterprise products, can take time. So ensure you have enough time to conduct the research and set the expectations with the team accordingly.

NEXT STEPS

There are many exciting changes happening in Azure Education. Not only are the most asked for features been implemented but pages with low NPS are getting a huge overhaul, there are ongoing plans to integrate stand-alone education related products into Azure Education etc.

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