Assessments Authoring

Rebuilding the survey authoring app that measures human growth

Assessments Authoring is an online survey creation tool that allows organizations to get insight on their people's life, faith and/or health status, and is running on a framework that is expensive to host.

Rebuilding the Assessment Authoring application development

Year

2021-2022

My Involvement

Design Lead
UX Research
User Testing & Analysis
Prototyping
Visual Design
Performance Monitoring
Feedback Gathering
Stakeholder Collaboration
Product Strategy

Environment

Web-based Browser


Research

Internal research and user feedback uncovered three primary problems with the Assessment Authoring application

Outdated

The assessments aurhoring application is buggy and looks outdated.

Expensive

The hosting of this application is costing the business $45,000 per month to host.

Cumbersome

Authors are experiencing usability problems when creating assessments.

The Opportunity

How might we make the Authoring application more modern, cost effective and expert driven?

Approach

Research's primary key findings are turned into goals for the application rebuild to solve for.

Outdated
Modern

Fix bugs in the applications and redesign the application to look more modern.

Expensive
Cost Effective

Rebuild the application in a opensource codestack that is less expensive to host.

Cumbersome
Expert Driven

The Assessments creation process should cater for expert capability and their needs.

Rebuild

The first phase is to rebuild the application on a modern open-source framework, redesign the data models and solve usability issues problems as identified by PO and Solution Owner.

Legacy Assessment Authoring tool
The original Assessments Authoring application.

Design Iteratively

The rebuild of the application is an active collaboration between Product and Development to architect for Data Integrity. The interface design for this application is highly inspired by the existing design of Assessments Basic application from the previous Lead designer for consistency.

Design exploration for different content modules for Assessement Authoring tool
Documentation and exploration of survey content modules.

Design

Expert Driven

The application remains expert driven, but catering even more to the expert assessment author with shortcuts for better proficiency.

Expert action support in the Assessment creation view for the Assessment Authorinhg tool
Redordering questions and instructions support in the Assessment creation view for the Assessment Authorinhg tool

Data Integrity

When considering design solutions, explore the potential side affect on data integrity, user privacy and author copyright.

Error prevention protocols to protect data integrity for the Assessment Authorinhg tool

Make the data Relevant

The author can explain the data results with the help of customized result pages using charts, specific questions and text annotations to help administrators and assessment takers to interpret the data as intended.

Helping authors tell the visual narrative of their results on the Assessment Authoring tool

Outcome

Measurable Results

In July of 2020 the rebuild of the Assessment Authoring application in React.js was feature complete.

$540,000 saved per year in hosting cost

With the rebuild in a modern framework, the business is saving $45,000 per month or $540,000 per year.

Collaboration

To ensure data integrity this project we worked closely as a team each representing their expertise.

Team:
Product Owner, Solution Owner, 1 Front-End Developer, 2 Back-End Developers, Director of Engineering.

What's Next?

Would you like to know more?

Curious about some of my findings, the interesting discovery made during test tasks design, and other qualitative outcomes?