CK-12 is an online learning platform. One of the most unique features of this non-profit company is that the users could create their own version of textbooks, and then publish the textbook to the CK-12 platform, for students to learn or teachers to use globally. In a team of three, our ultimate goal/task was to revamp the current CK-12 book editor tool to a smoother, and faster experience for the end-educator users.

 

Duration

  • 3 days brainstorming

  • 1 day wireframing

  • 1 day refine

  • 2 days of implementation  


Team Size

  • 1 Developer

  • 1 Project manager

  • 1 Content editor

  • 1 main UX/UI Designer/design grou


My Role

  • Research

  • UX/UI treatment UI treatment

  • User testing (end users)

What Happened?

In 2019, the product team at CK-12 realized that there were many complaints about the book editing system, one of the most important features that every educator will use to create their own version of online textbooks.

One of the main flaws that the original book editor design had, was users were confused about where to approach forward, and they wasted too much time on finding the components instead of continuing their writing process experience (They might forget what they want to write).

  • #1
    “Ok, MHM... Here we go. Wait, where is add..?”

  • #2
    ”There, found it.”

  • #3
    “Adding my book titles and chapter titles…easy.”

  • #4
    ”Cool. Now what?”

We started by asking 15 of our educators to simply create a book by using the book editor tool. The goal of this observation was to learn how much time the users were spending on finding elements to click through, and what might be some of their frustrations while using the platform. From our testing result, the amount of time that the educators spent on searching the “Add Content” button were about 5-10min. How might we make the book editing process experiences easier and faster for educators?

Research & Explorations

Since it was a short project, my team and I had three days to explore and research on how would writers/educators start their brainstorming, what would be their creative process, and how long it would take them from transforming their ideations into drafts, then into productions.

My team and I also interviewed a handful of authors, who were constantly creating content for math and science by using the CK-12 Platform, understanding some of their habits in creating a book. We were observing these five areas in particular:

  1. What are the essential sections when it comes to writing a book?

  2. What are some habits when an author is writing a book?

  3. Are there similarities or differences in writing a textbook compare to a novel?

  4. Are there any steps in writing a book that we could combine/eliminated, to help the author organize their files?

  5. How do authors organize their files?

Here are some key insights:


  • Guidline

    Writers use TOC as a timeline/guideline to communicate with their readers.

    The previous editing system was missing a guideline to show the next step.

  • Mobility

    Writers constantly move chapters and sections around after they created the content.

    What might be a faster way for the users to do brainstorming actions? Perhaps to move chapters around?

  • Focus

    Concentration is key to writers while editing the content. Any small or slow moves could trigger their emotions.

    Every click needs to be fast, minimize repetitive moves, and be effective.

Unfortunately, we were a small team. We didn’t have many resources that we could use to develop furthermore on our potential users. With the insights we had and the research we conducted, I tried some directions and tested with a few active users to validate my designs. There were also some guidelines that I needed to follow such as using the CK-12 rebranded component library, or how to introduce a new behavior to our end users.

Narrow Down…

After my team and I tested and confirmed with some users, then communicated with the product team and the dev team to confirm the project deadline and the production dates, we wanted to focus on the TOC building for the first release. In this release, we improved:

Adding an action button “Move to Chapter”, to provide a faster way for the users adds sections into a new chapter or an existing chapter.

 

The user now could pick add chapters/sections or search at the bottom of the TOC without clicking out or exit out the book editor tool.

 
New Drop Down
Adding New Chapters/Sections or search
Moving Sections to other Chapters

Of course, the COVID…

The year 2019 happened. The world changed. My team and I never had a chance to develop this project further. If I could continue to develop this project, I would validate with more potential users, and conduct A/B testing.

I would also like to revamp the entire textbook reading experience as well. CK-12 has another unique feature is to add a published text to the library, and the user could do customization base on their needs. Since we are now all working from home (almost), I do see there are many potential opportunities to improve the student learning process through an online platform, change the dull textbook reading time to an interactive online learning experience (revealing equations while hoovers over a math problem, showing related content, mimicking animal sounds while hoovering over vocabularies, etc).

Previous

Taste
Next

Playground