Invite Students
For teachers to more easily enroll students in their LabSim classes, we introduced an option preferred by 90% of instructors over previous alternatives, which saved significant time for our Customer Success Team.
Improving the “Invite Students” Process
At a Glance
Context: Improve teachers’ ability to add students to their classes without having to rely on the Customer Success team for help
My Role: UX/UI Designer
Results: Created a new “invite students” process, preferred by 90% of instructors over previous methods, that saved significant time for our Customer Success team
For teachers to more easily enroll students in their LabSim classes, we introduced an option preferred by 90% of instructors over previous alternatives, which saved significant time for our Customer Success team.
Intro
According to Woody Allen, “80% of success is just showing up." For TestOut instructors, getting students to show up in the LabSim platform was a challenge in and of itself. We created a new option for inviting students that was simpler and more effective than the existing alternatives. It was adopted over previous methods by more than 90% of instructors, collectively saving our Customer Success team 40 hours of work during their busiest weeks of the year.
Making Things Hard
Prior to the “Invite Students” feature, instructors had two options to add students to their classes.
CSV upload was a complex, fragile process that often required hand-holding in order to get it to work. It wasn’t intuitive, which resulted in frequent calls to Customer Success.
An easier option was to list students’ emails in the platform and have LabSim send the invitations. However, many school districts block emails from outside domains. Teachers thought their work was done, only to learn later that their students never received the emails.
Lastly, even when students had been added to the class, the instructors’ job was incomplete. They then had to provision a license for every student in the class. This separate step caused added confusion, requiring more time from Customer Success.
Making Things Easy
To address these problems, we created a step-by-step workflow to guide instructors through the invitation process. The new “Invite Students” feature avoided the complexity of CSV import and the barrier of districts blocking outside emails. It allowed instructors to copy an email template with an invitation link, and send it to students themselves. No need to upload a CSV, type in a list of student email addresses, or even copy and paste emails from a spreadsheet. And because the invitations came directly from the instructor, they didn’t get blocked.
We reduced confusion by adding a step-by-step process for enrolling students in a LabSim class.
Furthermore, the new invitation process included the provisioning of licenses. Therefore, once the invitations were sent, the instructor’s job was actually done: when students landed in the class, they already had access to course materials.
By improving the customer experience, the new process also alleviated Customer Success workloads during our busiest times of the year, saving a collective 40 hours per week for our Customer Success Team.
Provisioning licenses was added to the process for inviting students to a class.
Conclusion
Previous processes for adding students were complex, ineffective and incomplete. After the release of the “Invite Students” feature, over 90% of instructors chose the new method for inviting students. The improved process also resulted in significant time savings for our Customer Success Team during our busiest times of the year.