UnlockEd

TIMELINE

4 months
Sep. - Dec. 2023

SKILLS

User Research
Usability Testing
Prototyping

ROLE

Project Manager and Designer

Enhancing education access in prisons.

TEAM

1 Project Manager
1 Senior Designer
3 UI/UX Designers

CONTEXT

Unlocked Labs is a nonprofit founded in 2017 dedicated to widening and improving education access in prison. Their product UnlockEd is an all-in-one education access and management platform for prisons (think Coursera meets Canvas, adapted so that it can be run with or without the internet). UnlockEd can enable incarcerated learners to earn certifications and degrees while providing correctional administrators and researchers with a rich set of data on program effectiveness.

As the project manager overseeing a team of four designers, I and the senior designer spearheaded the redesign of UnlockEd over a semester. We led the team to revamp it completely and built the style guide and UI library, to serve as a valuable guide for future developers and designers in the platform's future development.

THE PROBLEM

UnlockEd was built without proper UX, and needs an overhaul.

UnlockEd is moving away from building an LMS and looking to aggregate courses and content. In order to enable that, UnlockEd is seeking to build a well-structured portal that allows students to access their courses and learning content, manage enrollments, and view their records of achievement.

Thus, we asked—

How might we design an intuitive and engaging education portal that allows users to easily access content, manage enrollment, and view their records of achievement?

SOLUTION PREVIEW

A Redesigned UnlockEd

Before

After

OUR PROCESS

We followed the double diamond approach.

Our two biggest phases (our two diamonds) were research and design. We conducted background, competitor, and user research, and we completed wireframes, low fidelity prototypes, high fidelity prototypes, and usability tests. All throughout, we were consistently guided by user-centric research.

RESEARCH

Understanding the problem space

Before we took on this project, education in prisons was an unfamiliar area for the whole team. So, I led the team in conducting comprehensive background research, sourcing scholarly articles, first-person accounts, scientific journals, and more to go over and discuss. Collaborating with the client, we curated relevant material to deepen the team’s understanding of the problem space, the associated issues, and the significance of our mission. This helped the team better understand the project's importance and the potential impact we could achieve.

We conducted 3 user interviews.

We spoke with 2 currently incarcerated individuals and 1 formerly incarcerated to learn about their experiences with the prison system, especially with regards to education and learning, as well as gather some insights about the current UnlockEd platform.

What did we gather?

After consolidating our notes from background and user research, we turned to affinity mapping to highlight overarching themes and key insights.

PROBLEM 1

Low quality of materials, education, and lack of beneficial clarity greatly hinders students’ motivation to learn.

  • Educational deficits in prisons are high, and successful engagement of people in education is low.

  • UnlockEd currently has a confusing interface and could be better catered to its users

SOLUTION

An intuitive, user-centric platform that enables users’ to take charge of their education, tailoring it to their specific goals.

PROBLEM 2

Improper/insufficient documentation of student progress makes it challenging to gain Earned Time Credit that can reduce sentences.

  • Many incarcerated learners have difficulty proving that they have spent time completing educational activities.

  • Currently, many rely on offline documentation which can be difficult to keep track of and is often not taken seriously by parole officers or judges in legal courts.

SOLUTION

Precisely track learning progress and present data and milestones in a clear, professional format.

Our next step was finding ways to address these issues and our problem statement altogether.

IDEATION

Wireframing and low-fidelity prototype

We met with the client to begin outlining some necessary user flows, laying the groundwork for determining MVP features for a comprehensive education portal. During ideation, our primary goal was to tackle identified pain points and devise optimal, streamlined solutions. Our approach emphasized the importance of keeping only what was essential, avoiding unnecessary fluff and designs. Here’s a look at the wireframes of the five key pages that guided our designs.

Then we converted our wireframes to a low-fidelity prototype to aid in clearer communication to stakeholders and in usability testing.

This allowed us to showcase a more tangible representation of our designs.

USABILITY TESTING

We conducted 2 internal usability tests with Unlocked Labs employees: one currently incarcerated and one formerly incarcerated

While our preferred participants would have been incarcerated individuals either having used UnlockEd in the past or unfamiliar with it, the very challenging and often impossible nature of connecting with this target audience led us to opt for internal usability testing. Despite this shift, we remained mindful of potential biases, and the usability tests we conducted still offered valuable insights, guiding improvements to our low-fidelity prototype as we transitioned to a high-fidelity prototype.

ENSURING COHESIVE DESIGN

I developed branding, a style guide, and a UI library

Before my team began developing high-fidelity designs, I had started creating guidelines for font, size, spacing, and later color along with the senior designer to ensure consistency throughout our team's work.

In the end, we were able to develop it into a much larger design system and expand the UI library to what it is now.

FINAL CONCEPTS

We converted our mockups to hifis and used insights from usability tests to guide design revisions

Let’s take a deeper dive into our main functionalities. Key changes between the low-fidelity prototype and high-fidelity prototype are indicated in the corresponding image.

Home Dashboard:

The home dashboard offers a holistic overview of the learner's key activities.

  • Quick links to 3 most recent courses/activities facilitate swift access to ongoing work

  • Right column prioritizes timely information: course announcements, notifications, upcoming deadlines

  • Numerous progress indicators are incorporated to enhance motivation, as research findings strongly backs this

My Courses:

My Courses allows users to find courses they have taken, are currently taken, or have requested permission to take. They can filter by current, completed, favorited, and/or pending courses.

My Progress:

Facilitating precise tracking of learning progress and presenting data and milestones in a polished, professional format was a key objective. My Progress serves both learners and external observers by providing a clear and transparent display of learning progress.

  • Users can quickly grasp running at-a-glance numbers: total time spent learning and number of courses completed through UnlockEd

  • Visualize the numbers through yearly visualization that illustrates the daily learning hours over a year

  • Detailed breakdown of completed courses

  • Any earned certificates or additional achievements obtained through course completion are shown

Course Catalog

This is an aggregate view of all courses users can access through UnlockEd

  • The colored pills provide a quick visual cue, allowing users to easily distinguish between whether a course is available for them to take or not

  • "Saved Courses" section, distinct from "Favorited Courses" in My Courses, allows users to curate a list of courses they intend to take or explore

Course Info:

Allows users to see a course and what it offers in more detail, so they can be more in control of their education and their experience.

  • A robust rating system sourced from either existing online reviews or community reviews within UnlockEd.

  • Provide access to the syllabus or course schedule for enhanced transparency, where available

Demo