Lumen Learning saw an opportunity to create the gold standard in courseware that centers equity for all students.

Through this exemplar, we challenged the idea of how we teach and learn, creating an adaptable product that reflects its users. All of them.

Minoritized students, specifically, Black, Latinx, Indigenous and low-income students face unique challenges. Lumen’s exemplar was an opportunity to create a gold standard for courseware that centers equity for these students. By designing a product for those who need the most support, we’ll design a better experience for everyone.

The new gold standard

For this project, centering and prioritizing equity meant centering our users and hearing from them directly — thus, really embedding user research into all of the project.

Over the course of the project, we conducted 23 user interviews total, with both students and faculty, to understand their pain points with existing learning tools and get feedback on our designs.

Equity for all students

Our user research reflected the following user mindsets. These mindsets helped contextualize what our users’ need and struggle with, and how we can support them on each one of our flows.

Students and faculty goals, motivations, and pain points change and evolve throughout the course of a semester, class, and even by day or hour. User mindsets proved to be more helpful than personas, since they are easily interchangeable and able to be layered together.

User mindsets

In addition to mindsets, we also developed experience principles from a combination of Lumen’s existing vision and what we heard from user interviews and stakeholder interviews. These experience principles helped set the vision for the product. These experience principles applied to everything throughout the project, from UX, UI, copy to motion design to how we facilitated our user interviews — we ensured that these principles were top of mind.

Experience principles

Our vision came to life across 9 features

With these experience principles in mind we identified 9 core features that would help solve both student and faculty needs and pain points. These features were crafted to help improve the product experience throughout the duration of a class or semester from its beginning, to middle, and end.

A core aspect of the product was creating opportunities for both faculty and students to connect on more of a human level.

One way we did this was to create a space where faculty could introduce themselves to their class in a more informal way. Allowing for more meaningful connections between faculty and their students and helping to establish trust at the start of the course.

We also designed a helpbot to lesson barriers for students to ask and find help at any point. Students can message their instructor personally, start a discussion with their classmates, or browse relevant campus and product resources.

Personal connection

We wanted there to be several ways in the product for students to easily track their progress, proficiency, and completion.

We were able to do this by leveraging the data from a Knowledge Check quiz at the start of a course to assess a students pre-req knowledge and suggest any relevant material they may need to review. All in an effort to make sure students don’t fall behind before the class even starts.

We also leveraged Self-checks quizzes through the course so student can see where assess their proficiency on the material and easily prioritize their efforts.

All the meanwhile serving this information back to faculty so they can provide actionable and meaningful support for their students.

Tracking progress

We also took in feedback from instructors and made sure learning outcomes were front and center.

By designing a faculty dashboard we created a centralized destination for instructors to track learning outcomes, proficiency, and improvement metrics.

We also created Module Insights which includes a more extensive view of student performance on prerequisite knowledge, topic material, and quiz results. Instructors can gain a clear understanding of student proficiency, including direct paths to support and celebrate students based on their results.