Brightspace Pulse
Background
D2L is well known for the products and tools it’s created to support teachers and administrators; however, in 2013, there was a renewed interest to discover how they can better support students. To do this they created a team dedicated to student tools and the first project was to revamp their old student-focused mobile app. At first there was a lot of expectation that we would try to recreate the core D2L tools in a mobile form factor, but after talking with many students on campus, we learned that course content was not what students cared most about, and instead they had the most trouble managing dates, deadlines and discovering when the more challenging course loads were going to occur during the term.
Who was involved
Personal learning department: 3 agile development teams, 3 designers, 3 product managers, development managers and the Director.
Design Team Lead / Manager (my role): worked closely with product managers to better understand the problem we were trying to solve through on-site user research. Led the design team to ensure app design for iOS and android addressed the problem statement including facilitating the design sprint and design challenge. Worked with Design Director to ensure coherence with overall product strategy for D2L.
Design Team: 3 designers, each on their respective agile team.
Design Director: worked within the product strategy group to inform on progress of design.
Product managers: Worked with user research to define the backlog and work with the development teams toward deadlines.
Problem
How might we support students to keep track of due dates and know what to do next across all courses.
How might we help students stay up to date on changes and anything new across all courses.
Solution
Brightspace Pulse was created and launched by the Personal Learning Team at D2L August 2015. Features included:
Weekly calendar to track important dates such as assignment due dates and midterms. Line chart indicated how much of final grade was due on each day. Students could swipe horizontally through each week to see what was due each day and see weekly workload.
Notifications and announcements pushed from instructors of each course including discussion threads and course events.
Swipe-to-reveal grades recreated the moment of anticipation of receiving the results of an evaluation.
Process
At the outset we conducted problem validation research as outlined in Running Lean by Ash Marya, to determine students’ most prominent challenges. This required bringing product managers on site to the University of the Waterloo, Wilfred Laurier and Conestoga College to find out what those challenges were directly from students. In this effort we discovered that accessing course content was not the highest priority for students and instead, keeping track of due dates and assignments and changes across courses was the most important problems to solve. This was a surprise, but the research results were defensible and allowed us to shift the priority of the project among the product management group.
After establishing the new problem statement focus, we conducted a design sprint across two teams of 5 including product managers, designers, and developers. This was the first design sprint conducted at D2L. This sprint was before the “Sprint” book by Knapp, et al. and focused on the methodologies outlined in the initial posts on the Google Ventures blog. For ideation and prototyping, we used real data from one of the student’s course outlines. We call that student “Jake”. For testing, we had an iPevo overhead camera, one moderator and an observation room with the remainder of the team. During testing, we knew we were on the right track when Jake saw his own data in the prototype and realized he would not be able to attend a hockey tournament later in the semester due to his course workload shown in a visualization. This was a story that resonated with the rest of the product group and helped to rally the organization around the initial release of the product with a dates and notifications focus.
After the design sprint, we wanted to explore the design concepts more deeply, so we held a week-long “Design Challenge” followed by design critiques and a “design wall” used to showcase a range of concepts stakeholders, including the CEO, to see and provide feedback. From this, we were able to home-in on a final design concept for the student app and the design team had an initial framework to step from.
After we clarified the future concept, we created a user story map on an open wall in the Personal Learning Department’s space. The user story map helped break down the student app concept into the first 3 releases and the first major functional release to be featured at the D2L flagship conference, Fusion, later that year. The story map highlighted key features that would be included in each release, but also what features would not be released for the conference. It was a living board and source of truth, where the team could have healthy debate about priorities. Features would rise up above release line for the conference and drop below the release line as a “maybe later”.
Design Concepts
My contribution to the Design Challenge was a concept called Due Date Bubbles that allowed students to scroll through a data visualization the grade-weight of their assignments and tests over the term. Through the criitque, we agreed the idea was informative and innovative, but it was also a bit too abstract and that took away from its practicality.
Outcomes of the project
The Personal Learning Team finished an initial demo of the app and it was presented by VP of Design, Christian Pantel, at D2L Fusion 2014 (unfortunately the photo below doesn’t include the Brightspace Pulse slide). The final launch was ready and in students’ hands before the start of the school year in September 2014.
Early in the following year, I presented results of methodology at SDEC Agile Conference in Winnipeg in 2015 with Pete Rothe, Director of Design Team at D2L. The talk was titled, Enough Up Front Design and shared how to use design sprint and design challenges to envision a big design idea and then how to break that down into small slices using user story mapping to launch as early as possible and continuously. The presentation included a workshop component that gave the participants an experience of a design challenge.
At D2L, there has been continued investment to expand Brightspace Pulse toward including content views along with dates management. This led to team-wide challenge to redesign mobile course content experience.
The latest version of the app has received a visual refresh to be consistent with the new Brightspace Daylight Design System. The current version in the App Store has a 4.6 star rating.