Improving learning outcomes for students through personalized tutoring

PLUS - Personalized Learning Squared

Timeline

4 months, January - May 2022

Role

UX Designer

Team

1 Product Manager, 2 UX Designers, 2 Engineers

Tools

Figma, Miro, Trello, Google Suite, Pen & Paper

What is Personalized Learning?

PLUS is a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Urban Education (CUE) and Carnegie Mellon University’s LearnLab. By pairing the power of human tutors with artificial intelligence, PL² targets opportunity gaps for K-12 students of color and other marginalized groups, piloting innovative approaches to personalized learning.

What did I do?

My responsibilities included a combination of creating new mockups and editing existing mockups for the PL² static website and app to improve the overall UI/UX. I was involved in sprint work with other designers, developers and product leads.

Project Brief

  • Redesign and mockup the existing web and mobile interfaces for the PL² app and static website to 1) elevate the user experience for students and tutors and 2) for parity to facilitate the work of future designers and developers.

  • Work cross-functionally to identify and improve usability issues and UI components.

Design System

I helped create a new design system to create cohesion and consistency between the PL² app and the website.

PL² App (Web & Mobile)

Wireframes to Mockups

For the app I re-designed the dashboard and lesson pages. I created wireframes first to decide on the main components of the dashboard screens. After discussing them with the rest of the team I mocked up high visual fidelity screens using the design system.

High-Fidelity Mockups

I was tasked with leading the Figma mockup creation of all the PL² app screens (web & mobile interfaces). After the dashboard screens were mocked up, I created a high-fidelity prototype of the PL² app. View the prototype here.

PL² Website (Web & Mobile)

High-Fidelity Mockups

The next task was to create mockups for the website pages; this included designing certain pages from scratch and redesigning others. Just as I had done for the app, I created a Figma prototype for the PL² website.

Reflection & Takeaways

This experience taught me how to work cross-functionally in a fast-paced, startup environment.

  • I became comfortable presenting my work and communicating my design decisions to developers.

  • I learnt how to work with an existing design system and iterate on mockups. My prior UX Design experience mostly included creating prototypes from scratch; this experience gave me the opportunity to do both - create mockups from scratch and iterate on existing prototypes to improve the user experience.

  • I learnt how to do sprint work and collaborate with engineers, product managers and other team members to meet users’ needs and business objectives.

If you enjoyed this case study, check out some other projects!