examsoft

The ExamSoft Portal is a one-stop platform that helps provide easy reporting, efficient assessment creation and streamline delivery. It allows teachers to spend more time teaching and less time dealing with testing complications.

how might we questions

1. Decrease the time it takes for an educator to create an assessment for their students?

2. Increase the likelihood that educators will use most features designed into the software?

3. Make the software less confusing/difficult to use and more user-friendly?
   

introduction

We had a team of 6 UX designers (junior, mid-level, senior) and a creative director to help drive the design portion of this project. This project was the first big project at our company to incorporate a full agile system allowing researchers, designers, and developers to work together and deliver well-designed screens/pages to our clients using sprint ceremonies. We conducted many validation testing to help shape the current design of the new Examsoft software.

The team full of designers were split off into two pods (3 on one pod, 3 on another pod). They were coordinated by having one junior, one mid-level and one senior designer on each pod. Every day we had cadences of pow-wow meetings, design sync-up meetings, design review meetings, and heads down time to design/complete user stories.

Design process

Some user stories that I tackled during the design portion of the project was to help create an import queue system allowing administrators and educators to upload files with questions from their computers into the software that accepted different file types, strategize a way to insert tables inside an answer choice when creating a question, incorporate fill in the blanks inside tables when creating a question, design the layout of students’ reports, and other collaborative user stories that I helped design with other UX designers.

Import Queue

The old software that many administrators and educators used to create and administer assessments would not allow uploading questions in bulk that were on an Excel sheet or Word document. The users would have to manually type in each question into the system which would be a tedious job for them. Other users may have also added the same question into the system as well which would create duplicates and create more work to remove them.

The Import Queue feature allows users to easily upload any file document consisting of questions needed to create their assessment from their computer into the software. On the backend, the system would identify the questions using a specific format algorithm that detects the question type and the answer choices within the file document. The drag and drop feature was inspired by Dropbox because it created a simple way to upload file documents into the system easily without having the hassle of clicking on buttons and finding files to upload. Once a file document was uploaded, the user would be able to see which questions were successfully created based on how Examsoft formatted questions into their system. They would also see which questions were not successfully formatted and which questions needed revisions because of errors on how it obtained formatted. Users were able to manually format unsuccessful questions and fix errors on other questions. This feature was extremely useful for those that have so many documents to upload onto Examsoft and did not want to have duplicated questions on their assessments. The time to upload a file document into the Import Queue took substantially less time than manually adding individual questions into the system.

Adding Tables Inside An Answer Choice / Incorporate Fill In the Blanks Inside Table

Figuring out a way to create a table inside an answer choice was difficult without trying to confuse the user on how to use this feature. Similar to a Word document, the user taps on the Add Table icon inside an answer choice. A pop out would appear asking how many columns and how many rows to create a table. The user would type in the correct amount for each and then a table would show inside the answer choice. The user can put in relevant data inside the table pertaining to the specific question. If the table was created for a fill in the blank question, then the user can create blanks within the table cell that is relevant to the question being asked.

high fidelity designs