Addressing specific pain points on the teacher training videos website
6 min read
Role:
UX Researcher/designer
Services:
UX Research, competitive analysis, benchmarking, persona generation.
An overview of the problem
Russell Stannard is a key name in the world of English language teaching (ELT) and has worked with major publishers such as Macmillan, Express Publishing & Richmond. Russell also has strong links with the British Council, the UK’s global organisation and charity that offers English exams, exchange programmes in addition to English language teaching services. He has received numerous awards for his work and for his website teachertrainingvideos.com. Whilst the content on Russell’s site is almost flawless big issues exist with the look and feel of the website. Furthermore, parts of the site are particularly confusing or difficult to navigate. His site is also not well-optimized for mobile.
For this reason, I have decided to pursue a partial redesign of Russell Stannard’s teachertrainingvideos.com website for the desktop version to improve the user experience in any way I can and to further understand any significant pain points.
Goals/role in the project
- To facilitate a better user experience for the teachertrainingvideos.com desktop experience by improving its UI.
- Take full ownership of the various roles involved in designing a product such as user research, user experience designer, and product design.
Understanding the market landscape
I began by conducting a competitive analysis of how other video course providers are solving the problems around video learning. I chose Skillshare, Udemy, and FutureLearn (3 prominent providers of video-based learning) to fully understand how users can locate, access, and view video learning content. I concentrated on how UI features were laid out, the user flow, and navigation on both desktop and mobile versions.
Profile of the users
I began my case study with a brand analysis of teachertrainingvideos.com, learning about its competitors (see above) and customer demographics along the way.
Some key takeaways from 55 people surveyed:
- Almost three-quarters of teachers surveyed were female.
- Most of these users are using desktops 52.7% to access video content, whilst mobile devices are catching up fast and account for 47.3% of users.
- Half surveyed are over the age of 40.
- The most popular videos on the site by far seem to be ‘Zoom, the flipped classroom, and Google Tools’.
- Most surveyed appear to watch videos through YouTube and Facebook feeds.
User testing and feedback
I felt it fundamental to understand more about people’s true intentions for watching training videos, at this stage. This led me to design approximately 10 questions to understand more about the users and what they were looking to seek and gain from the website.
Analysing the results: Affinity mapping
An affinity map is often used to group similar observations together. I used it to measure several key issues which were common among the participants surveyed.
Analysing the results: 2x2 matrix
Another tool I utilised was the 2×2 matrices. This helped me to better understand the relationships between things on a spectrum. I used this to map issues important to teachertrainingvideos.com’s users versus business goals. It also helped me prioritise which issues needed dealing with first.
Identifying the problem
- 8 out of 10 users wanted to ‘search’ for a video and couldn’t. They had to trawl through the videos section.
- 8 out of 10 users wanted the ‘publish date’ to be viewable on the videos.
- 10 out of 10 users wanted the menu bar to be redesigned.
- 7 out of 10 of users did not like the design of the videos and felt they needed simplifying.
Persona generation
I created a user persona to put a face on the typical target user of teachertrainingvideos.com typical audience. I wanted to understand their behaviour and motivations. As the site is only used by teachers I have included just one persona
I have only added one persona because from talking to the majority of users this persona typifies up to 97% of our website’s audience. The other 3% are administrators or publishers who don’t have a need for the website’s content.
Unlike other digital products or websites where there might be multiple stakeholders, teachertrainingvideos.com is only aimed at supporting and helping English language teachers which is a niche audience. All of the data within the persona was collected at the face-to-face usability study sessions thus ensuring its accuracy.
Suggestions and redesigns
The new menu bar condenses the amount of information by being more organised. The most essential points are moved to the right-hand side. Key features such as the videos and the ability to search are now in the middle of the page to assist the user to find what they need as quickly as possible. I also designed a new ‘look and feel’ based on a template design with set fonts, colours and menu items to ensure overall consistency.
Validation & lessons learned
- 10 out of 10 found the new menu layout to be clearer and faster.
- 9 out of 10 users greatly appreciate the new search function and found the whole process much more intuitive.
- 10 out of 10 users like the signup option for new videos being less prominent on the site and shifted to the bottom of the homepage.
- 10 out of 10 said the new videos section is a vast improvement,
- 10 out of 10 found the publish date really useful for newly updated videos.
I really enjoyed this project, especially as I used to teach English as a Foreign Language occasionally myself and could relate to many of the common frustrations the people I interviewed were telling me. As often in education, a lot of digital products are pedagogically speaking well researched and built but developed without much consideration for the end-user and this project offered me a real chance to change the status quo.
What I feel could be further improved: As this was a personal project, I would have liked to have seen this developed commercially. When I spoke to the owner of the website he was reluctant to implement my changes because of a contract he has with another provider. What is disappointing is I feel if my changes were to be implemented the engagement rate would be significantly higher and would be more accessible for users.