Without a conscious determination to connect your efforts to the big picture, it’s easy to run into this scenario Yogi Berra described: “We’re lost, but we’re making good time!” 

At TestOut, I worked closely with Product Management to ensure that our day-to-day work moved the needle on top company priorities. Through communication with stakeholders, research inside and outside the organization, and focused follow-through, we implemented features and improvements that advanced company goals by reducing administrative overhead, providing better reporting, facilitating assessments, and improving the onboarding experience.

Intro

In July 2021, TestOut President Don Whitnah emailed the company about the challenges we faced and the opportunities he saw. I worked with Product Management to identify how we could drive progress on achieving the vision Don shared. 

Process

We reached out to customer-facing teams (Sales, Customer Success, Support) to better understand the problems they and our customers faced. We identified which of the top challenges aligned with the company goals Don had outlined. We distilled the list into 5 areas of potential impact:

• Promote products within LabSim (our learning platform).

• Increase employee focus on sales by removing administrative overhead.

• Provide better learning analytics to demonstrate the effectiveness of TestOut courseware.

• Create new features that bring value to instructors and students.

• Alleviate the “first two weeks” pain points experienced by students and instructors at the start of each semester.

We presented these objectives, with practical suggestions for each, to the LabSim Council, TestOut’s governing body. After our presentation, we sent out a survey so council members could consult with their teams and vote on priorities. 

Based on the Council’s feedback, we refined the list, removing the first item (promoting products within our learning platform), and focused on solutions for the other four impact areas.

Follow-Through

With an established and approved connection to company priorities, we went to work implementing the following to address each of the remaining four objectives.

Increase Employee Focus on Sales by Removing Administrative Overhead

• Improved License Management: Previously, our Customer Success team spent a lot of time responding to requests to reallocate licenses assigned to students who moved or dropped a class. We added the ability for school admins to reallocate licenses themselves. This saved time for Customer Success, and removed a headache for instructors.

• Temporary Access: Account Executives were receiving an average of 40 emails at the beginning of each semester, from professors requesting temporary access for students who were waiting on financial aid. These students couldn’t buy the courseware they needed, and were falling behind in class. We set up a system whereby instructors could grant students temporary access to courseware without having to contact TestOut. This was another win-win for instructors and TestOut employees.

Provide Better Learning Analytics to Demonstrate the Effectiveness of TestOut Courseware

• Study History Reports: Many sales to K-12 schools took place on a district level, but we had no district-level reporting to demonstrate the value we were providing. Furthermore, after the pandemic, in order to receive full funding, districts needed tools to track study time by at-home students. We created a study history report that showed time spent per course on district, school, and class levels. Admins and instructors could drill down to see results for individual students, showing how much time a student spent on individual lessons, labs, videos, and exams. This reporting not only met district needs, but also provided valuable insights for teachers. The Study History Report became our third most-accessed in-platform report. 

Create New Features That Bring Value to Instructors and Students

• Custom Exam Updates: Custom exams are a powerful tool that allow instructors to create their own assessments within our platform. With input from instructors, we improved the workflow for creating and scheduling custom exams. We also added top-requested features, including the ability to select whether questions show in a random or a specified order, and the ability to identify a superset of questions from which the platform would show a random subset.

Alleviate “First Two Weeks” Pain Points

• Improved License Management and Temporary Access, both mentioned above, not only removed administrative overhead, but improved the “first two weeks” experience for students and instructors.

• HubSpot Integration: We worked with Engineering to integrate the LabSim Message Center, an in-platform inbox, with our CRM, HubSpot, allowing us to send targeted messages to assist instructors and students as they started using our platform.

Conclusion

Through an intentional focus on the big picture, and by doing internal and external research, we identified the top UX challenges that aligned with company goals. With stakeholder approval, we added platform features and enhancements to advance TestOut’s goals by reducing administrative overhead, providing improved reporting, improving assessments, and addressing onboarding pain points.

Note: Where are the images? I gathered the data for the basis of this case study in October 2023. However, I failed to gather images and publish the case study at that time. At this point, I don’t have access to the files I worked on in order to show images. Am I kicking myself? Yes. Is it doing any good? Not really.