— PROJECT NAME
einsOS
— ROLE
UX Designer
(UI+UX+Research+Testing)
— DATE
Oct '18 to Apr '19
einsOS was the 1st iteration (2nd iteration is Kneura) of an extremely agile project, done to create a digital platform that provides everything related to education.
einsOS comes bundled with multiple applications to teach using digital whiteboard, take attendance, give assessment, get curated content, get performance reports, grading etc.
CNX hardwares (Galileo) runs einsOS app as a digital whiteboard and einsOS also gives device performance and usage tracking for the said hardwares.
einsOS was first-ever SAAS ever done by our startup and its primary motive was to drive the sales of Galileo hardware which is an interactive display device.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Cybernetyx.
My Role
einsOS initially started as a device performance tracking analytics software, and from there it grew to einsAdvisor, einsAssessment, einsLibrary, einsManage, and einsClass.
I was responsible for laying down the developer hand-off practices, design thinking exercises, information architectures, feature discovery, researching competitions & features , usability tests, and building the user interfaces.
I worked very closely with the AVP Design (My Manager) Tarun Pratap, and MD (Product Owner) Nishant Rajawat during the whole lifecycle of the product.
einsOS was a huge collaborative effort and it would have been very difficult if not for Prasad (Associate Product Manager), Noella (Senior Designer – Visual Communications), and Tarun (AVP Design) helping me out.
Branding, website design, and product hardware design attributed to Noella and Tarun.
Learnings
One of my mistake was not being in touch with the actual product. The lack of proper collaboration and communication led to some incorrect behaviours and many loose-ends.
The global content navigation/hierarchy was fragile from the start and we were building over that weakness. Like the einsOS apps were on the top level and inside them, you have these option to select the class (+subjects). Having all these einsOS apps as buckets in classes (+subjects) would have resulted in better navigations and we achieved this in the next iteration of einsOS, that is Kneura.
Initially, there was no final vision of what we wanted to achieve, and every app was designed individually, but later they came together to make einsOS. Because of this agile approach there were brand inconsistencies in between the einsOS application, which led to design debts. A design system would have solved it.
Audience
Teachers
Through Galileo ONE (einsClass), teachers can teach geometry, painting, or write seamlessly. They can, with einsOS, create lesson plans, manage attendance and assess assignments.
Admins
einsOS come with with grading and reporting features, one can also track the utilization of installed devices in classes and monitor the progress made.
Students
With Galileo ONE (einsClass), students can collaborate on a panel in real-time, participate in group activities and make presentations. Students can connect their personal learning devices and contribute to class discussions from their seats. They can also attend classes and give tests remotely when they’re sick.
Design Thinking exercises were led by me and the participants included Prasad (Associate Product Manager), Geet (Product Tech Manager), Digraj (Project Manager), and Tarun (AVP Design).
Teacher’s Empathy Map
Admin’s Empathy Map
Teacher’s Empathy Map
The DT exercises were not only done for generating insights on what we had to do, but also to give us all a reference point to work with.
We referred to “Harish” the teacher and “Rohit” the student personas during everyday discussions, which bought clarity regarding the stories we were trying to solve, and helped us all (Dev+Design+PM) empathize with the users and do the due diligence required to make our personas feel comfortable using our product.
einsOS Dashboard
All einsOS apps have their own specific role. Class is a digital whiteboard for teaching, Academy provides curated content to make lessons, Analytics shows device usage & generated performance report for classes, Connect is for chat & PTM meetings, Assess is related to creation and submission of assessments and Manage is for taking teachers' and students' attendance & to manage the user IDs of people involved in the institute's einsOS.
After login each role land on the same dashboard but apps changes to do the things that that role requires, like for student Assess is for submission and Manage, Analytics, Class are not shown.
Brand icons attributed to Noella and Tarun.
einsOS onboarding and institute creation attributed to Tarun & Noella
Onboarding or the overall dashboard concept works fine for a closed platform but the number of onboarding steps, although with skip option, are too long and the actual functioning or stories are not visible until you open some app.
I revisited this issue in next iteration, in Kneura which is free for signup, we reduced the onboarding process to a single step and all the imports and creation part were packaged in their own modules. This made the users invest in the app first and when required, they had the option to create content/people.
einsClass
einsClass was work in progress when I joined and the core was already designed. I was involved much later in this app. I was responsible for the final bush up and the latest feature additions.
einsClass exist at the center of the einsOS ecosystem, it runs on Galileo hardware and is used by teachers to create lesson.
einsClass signin screen facelift @me
The einsClass dashboard final facelift @me
Attributed to Tarun & Noella
Attributed to Tarun & Noella
Attributed to Tarun & Noella
Attributed to Tarun & Noella
The bucket functionality integration @me
Attributed to Tarun & Noella
Attributed to Tarun & Noella
Attributed to Tarun & Noella
One important reason for 1st iteration being 'not successful' was the design architecture. This app on whole was made with accretion, all of that made it bulky and we were unable to handle more module integration like assessment, attendance, content directly in the einsClass application.
Other issues were related to pagination, for years, my colleagues were used to the pagination where the CTA buttons were addition & deletion and navigation was through selecting & scrolling in the middle area.
Both of these concerns were foundation for the next iteration (Kneura) and the whole architecture was build to solve these concerns.
Read more about the Canvas (einsClass) Redesign Project & see its final form.
einsAnalytics
This is where I came in, I was hired to help architect a solution for showing analytics related to the CNX devices.
It was important for the potential clients (Indian Government) to know how their ordered devices were being used by teachers and the whole institute alike.
The questions were: how the devices were being used? how much were the the teachers using the whiteboard solution (einsClass) we give with the CNX hardware? What other apps were they using? were they even using the hardware? if yes then who all were those that were using it effectively and by how much?
I was given a requirement doc, the proposal from the Indian government- EOI Doc and these were the insights that I received after consuming it:
They looked better on a large canvas, as u can see the relations clearly. We lost it as I never took that photo. I am still unsure how to save these large sticky maps, one way is using some digital tools like Miro but physical feels more like an exercise compared to the digital counterparts.
Once the proposed solution for the above EOI doc was done, and other einsOS apps were getting in the picture, we scaled the analytics part to assessments/performance, attendance, and behaviour analysis.
For the student performance related analytics, I did research on what all insights/graphs to show and how to showcase the data such that it makes sense to the educators and help them improve the performance for each student in their classroom. The study I referred to is the IES Published practice guide – Using achievement data to support instructional decision making, I have highlighted all the important insights in this PDF, if you want to have a quick look.
Following is the Admin's Analytics App, it has 2 views, one is Device view that was the original 1st iteration of this app, and the 2nd view is classroom view, that was later added as other einsOS apps came into the picture.
Pattern Library: using colors, shadows to show focused, active, and inactive fields.
Few concerns I received due to the colors used, they were too cold, and our marketing was expecting something more peppy. This App was designed to be like a dashboard which was visible on a large screen, and anything attracting attention was equal to something not getting that attention. But in later iteration (Kneura) I was able to achieve a balance between marketable and usable.
The number of breadcrumbs / filters for locations are too many in numbers, and are responsible for a huge cognitive load, but they were the part of the requirement I received. I created zone filters to circumvent the filter selection that requires an initial creation overhead, but they made the whole flow much better in the long run.
The filters / breadcrumbs were part of the most important route in the whole app. To access more detailed data you had to go through them. I tested all parts of this red route through paper prototyping before handing it off for dev.
Doing paper prototyping to validate at initial stage.
einsLibrary
Through einsLibrary we were trying to create a content catalog for each topic, subject, standard, and boards using web crawlers.
einsLibrary is a content bucket for educators, providing them with videos, pictures and text to prepare their own lessons.
It was work in progress when I came. When I joined, I revamped the whole app other than the core navigation (this is where that architecture issue <class+subject inside each app> roots from)
Illustration attributed to @noella
Home Screen
Filters for search
Recommendations for search
Search Result
Reading Content from My Courses and saving them to a Bucket
einsOS provides teachers content for planning their lessons. You can search for content through einsLibrary and add them to buckets which when required can be accessed in einsClass during live lectures.
My Courses Tab
Content view
Content view
Content view
Add content to a bucket
My Buckets Tab
einsAsssess
einsAssess is an assessment managing application, it assists teachers to create and mark their assessments, for students it provides an easier digital solution to access and submit these assessments.
einsAssess, to assist teachers, provides a feature to generate quick questions though some paragraph using ML, and also provides a question bank where you can store questions for future uses.
einsAssess Dashboard where you find all the created assessment marked by their statuses.
The Assessment Builder
The Assessment builder is designed to be similar to the forms creators you find on web.
To increase the error tolerance of the system, we auto-filled a default text for both question and answers, and depending on the question type the first answer option is auto-selected as the would-be-answer.
To keep the interface clutter-free all the optional actions like ‘add image’, ‘delete’, ‘copy’ are hidden, visible only onClick.
A default title is auto assigned when a new assessment is triggered which can be changed anytime.
META UI: To show how all the field works when clicked. OnClick shows all the actions possible for that field.
Creating a question: very similar to how forms are designed on web. When creating a new question, we auto fill the question and the answers with default text depending on what type of question it is.
Creating Subjective Questions
META UI: To show how all fields behave when clicked. OnClick all available actions on the fields are shown.
Students taking Assessments
Students see the same einsAssess app in their einsOS dashboard, their einsAssess app shows all the assessments they have received, with their respective statuses. Assessments consisting of all objective questions are automatically marked but assessments with subjective questions are sent to teachers for marking, only after that the results are available for the students.
Subjective question checking by Teachers
Importing questions in Assessment Builder from the Question Bank by Teachers
Auto generating questions in Assessment Builder using a paragraph by Teachers
Question Bank
