Anthony Wu

CLIENT

Language Educators

ROLES

UX Designer

UX Researcher

COLLABORATORS

Wizlab Team

TIMELINE

12 months

CONTEXT

Language educators lack the time and resources for personalized instruction

Teachers have to juggle classroom management, lesson planning, and most importantly individual support for their students. These are the main responsibilities of a teacher in order to support student success.

The lesson planning process consumes 10+ hours of a teachers time each week

With the launch of Wizlab, we aimed to better support language teachers in addressing diverse student needs while reducing teacher workload at the same time.

SOLUTION

Personalized learning should be easy for teachers and available to students

AI Assistant for Educators

Generate Learning Materials

Differentiating Learning Materials

THE PROCESS

Pivoted 6 times to arrive at current build

I joined this project as a founding ux designer in May 2024 and since then our product has pivoted 6 times. We went from an app that gamified education for k-5, a class management application, social media platform for teachers, a worksheet generator, to finally an AI-teaching assistant. We maintained some features from previous builds and for our 6th pivot we narrowed down our project scope down to language learning.

Overall user flow / product requirements

Our process began with drafting the user flow / information architecture. Speaking with teachers and looking at previous iterations I created this sketch with the data and insights collected, to get an idea of how many pages we needed as well as how might the user go through the process.

Wizlab consists of 4 main pages: the Login page, the Dashboard page where you can find your previous generated materials, the Prompt page to generate more materials, and the Editor to modify your generations. For this case study I will focus on the design of the prompt page a core feature of our product.

Dashboard

Prompting

Editor

The prompting page will be where teachers will be asked to provide information on their student / class requirements to generate learning materials.

Sketch 1

Sketch 2

Reducing information overload

Language teachers have many different variables to consider when creating learning materials. While it is desirable for the user to have detailed control over, for example, alignment to CCSS ELA Literacy standards, some users can find it to be too complex to use. To make it more approachable to use, I moved some select options into a pop-up window under advanced options for teachers that wanted that complexity. This decluttered the page making it less dense and easier to digest.

Final Design

Previous Design

Two page design

I experimented with several iterations of the prompting page based on user testing and one of them was a two-page design. The two-page design was to help reduce the amount of information and make it less intimidating. In terms of time on task, users spent more time within the prompting phase, going back and forth between the two pages.

2 Page Design

Moving groups later in process

What if we removed the group process out of the prompting phase? To further my ideation of the prompting process, I fell back on research / insights: language teachers realize the need for differentiating materials after learning materials are made. To make it more digestible, I took out additional criteria, enlarged the remaining text box, and designed a import pop-up window.

Upload Pop-up

Standards moved to first step

To further align the prompting process with our research of current practices of language teachers, I moved the standards options to the top of the page because it’s one of the first requirement defined.

Standards First

Generation suggestions

→

CONCLUSION AND LESSONS LEARNED

Building an efficient prompting experience and engineer hand-off

This is my first project as a full-time founding designer at a startup. As one of two designers on the team, it was a new experience taking full ownership of the design process for the features assigned to me. However looking back, I believe it was an incredible growth opportunity learning how to navigate and push through moments of ambiguity. Building a product from 0 - 1 and collaborating with the founders who shared the strategic insights behind our product provided me with valuable insights into aspects of the product development process that geos beyond my responsibilities as a UX designer.