Panorama Education

Driving Client Retention Through Optimizing Staff Access to Student Data

MY ROLE

I led the design strategy, user research, experience design for the end-to-end project to launch a student data access tool.

Project Dates

May 2024 - June 2024

TEAM

Product Manager (1)

Engineers (2)

CONTEXT

The business problem

Panorama, a B2B SaaS company in the EdTech space, empowers school districts nationwide with student support and academic tracking solutions. However, a critical gap existed – the inability for essential school staff to access the data they needed. This hurdle resulted in client churn and the potential loss of future business.

The customer problem

School administrators rely on a diverse support staff, including psychologists and coaches, who require access to student data within Panorama to perform their critical roles. However, the existing platform lacked the ability to grant these staff members the appropriate level of access to student data. This limitation hampered their ability to effectively support students and hindered the overall well-being of the student population.

Our goal

Let’s provide a staff-to-student access solution that will provide school district support staff the access they need and remove the churn-risk that these dissatisfied clients pose.

My contributions

Research & Testing

Interviewed customer service, client liaison team members, and current school administrators. Analyzed their feedback alongside usability testing results to gain a comprehensive understanding of user needs.

Design & Execution

Updated design system, designed prototypes, and defined functionality and interaction behavior.

Vision & Strategy

Defined core feature concepts for an access list, and aligned other product teams within Panorama.

Project Management

Facilitated leadership check-ins and working groups to ensure stakeholder buy-in.  Worked closely with Engineering to define project scope and product requirements.   Led product QA.

RESEARCH

User Research: Understanding Client Needs

To identify key pain points and potential opportunities, we conducted a comprehensive user research phase. This involved in-depth interviews with a diverse range of stakeholders:

School Administrators: Understanding the specific challenges they faced in managing staff access to student data.
School Tech Leads: Gaining insights into their technical requirements and existing workflows.
Customer Support Staff: Learning firsthand about the client support issues arising from access limitations.
Client Liaisons: Gathering feedback on client frustrations and potential use cases for improved staff access.

User Research Reveals Challenges:

Our user research uncovered several critical challenges impacting client experience and potentially leading to churn:

1. Workarounds and Frustration: Many districts resorted to complex workarounds to manage staff access, resulting in a subpar user experience and client frustration.
   
2. Client Churn Risk: Some clients, dissatisfied with limited access options, abandoned Panorama products for their support staff. These lost clients posed a significant churn risk, potentially seeking out competitors.
   
3. Inefficient Access Management: To grant access, some districts were forced to assign support staff administrative roles, exceeding their actual access needs and potentially granting access to unwanted areas of Panorama.
   
4. Limited Role Options: The existing system lacked appropriate roles for support staff. Tying roles to rosters (used for teachers) wasn't suitable for staff working across grade levels. The only alternative was an "administrator" role, providing access beyond what was necessary and potentially compromising security protocols.

Internal Collaboration: Bridging the Gaps

Internal challenges arose in granting support staff access to new platform features. To address this, we:

• Collaborated with other teams to identify their access use cases.
  
• Maintained open communication to keep everyone informed.
  
• Created a cross-platform access visualization to share a holistic view.

Providing visuals on the current state of user access versus our future vision was helpful in aligning other teams.

VISION & STRATEGY

Product-Agnostic Approach: Driving Widespread Impact

Our discovery phase revealed a crucial need for a solution that transcended individual products. The access issue impacted numerous areas of the Panorama platform. By adopting a product-agnostic approach in designing the student access tool for support staff, we ensured the solution's scalability and maximized its impact across the entire platform.

Centralizing the tool by placing it in the Admin Dashboard would make it available across all product areas.

Balancing Needs with Efficiency: Strategic Decision Making

In collaboration with our engineers, we explored the database implications of building a school-level staff access management tool. User research revealed a diverse client base with varying needs:

• Centralized Control: Some districts desired control over access management to be restricted to the district office.
  
• School-Level Autonomy: Others expressed a preference for school administrators managing access within their schools.

While an all-encompassing solution was ideal, we recognized the technical complexities and potential for a data structure overhaul. Prioritizing speed and impact, we opted to focus on building the school-level tool first. This prioritized addressing the most prevalent user need and allowed for a quicker, more efficient solution.

We had to define at what level of the school group these access controls would live.

DESIGN

Defining the Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Collaboration and Prioritization

To establish a development roadmap and gauge engineering capacity, we collaborated with our engineers on initial design explorations. Here's how these low-fidelity designs served the project:

1. Identifying Minimum Viable Product: Working with engineers, we aimed to define the smallest, yet valuable solution deliverable in the shortest timeframe. These lo-fi designs helped us establish the core functionalities for this initial version.
   
2. Shared Vision and Prioritization: The lo-fi prototypes facilitated team alignment on the solution's essential features, differentiating "must-haves" from "nice-to-haves."
   
3. Iterative Development and Future Improvements: The exploration process also revealed functionalities beyond the MVP scope but valuable for future enhancements. This early prioritization informed future development roadmaps.

USER TESTING

Validating the MVP Through Testing

Collaborated with my project manager to conduct user testing on a school district prototype with 12 participants, including district tech leaders, counselor leads, and school administrators.

Testing addressed three key areas: use cases, MVP validation, and workflow integration/user education.

User testing called out questions about how a school admin would find and add students.

Prioritizing User Needs: Batch Selection over CSV Upload

Usability testing revealed a valuable insight: while users didn't necessarily miss the ability to upload student data via CSV, they expressed a strong preference for batch-selecting students.

Responding to this feedback, we pivoted the design approach in subsequent iterations. A data table interface was implemented, allowing users to efficiently select multiple students at once. This shift prioritized user needs for a streamlined workflow over the initial CSV upload solution.

Enhancing Student Discovery: Prioritizing User Needs

Client feedback revealed a crucial need for robust student filtering functionalities. School districts frequently needed to form student groups based on specific demographics:

• Common Use Cases: Grade level and gender emerged as the most frequently used criteria for grouping students.
  
• Additional Needs: Many clients also relied on last names to define student cohorts.

Adding more filters would have limited our ability to ship faster due to the engineering expense.

Prioritizing Shipping Faster Led to Further Scope Cuts:

Partnering with our engineer, we acknowledged the importance of these filtering capabilities for user success. To accommodate this critical functionality within the MVP timeframe, we made collaborative design trade-offs:

• Focus on Core Functionality: We prioritized engineering resources towards building out robust student filters.
  

Faced with the risk of client churn, we cut scope aggressively to try to launch this feature early. Here, we traded in the dashboard for a simple table.

To accommodate the new filtering system, we opted for a long-form design instead of a stepper flow. While this simplified the user interface, it ensured the inclusion of this essential functionality.

Another of the design tradeoffs was to remove the stepper flow and create one form for creating an access list.

FINAL DESIGNS

OUTCOMES & LESSONS

Key Outcomes & Results

• This release is critical in providing key functionality, and reducing the risk of clients churning due to the lack of this feature.
• This feature is slated to be released in Q2 of 2024.

What I Learned

• Although we had to make a series of tradeoffs to cut scope and reduce time to launch, our user testing kept us on task with providing the optimal MVP experience for our clients.
• Launching with some value sooner is better than waiting for the ideal later.  

Design Strategy / UX & UI / Research