Gallopade Curriculum Course Setup
Enables teachers to tailor their classes by adding specific grade-level curriculum content to assign to their students.
Project Overview
Problem
The steep learning curve for new teachers using Gallopade Curriculum was preventing some teachers from not fully completing the course setup flow.
Process
Rather than a lengthy redesign, we implemented focused enhancements and strategically timed releases during summer months to minimize disruption to teachers.
Impact
Reduced course setup complexity which led to a 42% reduction in per-capita help searches and 75% drop in views for the course setup help article.
I helped redesign the course setup experience for Gallopade Curriculum, and improve the success rate for teachers setting up their courses.
With Gallopade Curriculum, an online learning platform, teachers could assign social studies learning materials to their students. To address teacher pain points, the Gallopade team set out to redesign their course setup experience.
Collaborating with the UX design lead and the Gallopade team, we sized the scope of this project and technical constraints. I was responsible for assisting in mapping the user journey, leading design refinement, and delivering design specifications for a final hand-off to the development team.
My Role:
Primary Designer
The Team:
UX Design Lead
UX Designer (me)
UX Researcher
Product Owner
Timeline:
Jan 2025 – Mar 2025
Problem
The steep learning curve for new teachers using Gallopade Curriculum was preventing some teachers from not fully completing the course setup flow.
We aligned with the Gallopade team to understand what the current user flow was for a new teacher using Gallopade Curriculum to setup their course. Speaking with trainers, we received insights on common pain points teachers were running into during the course setup flow.
Pain Points
Failing to add and link classes.
Teachers struggled with manually add classes to Gallopade Curriculum that have been assigned to them at the admin level. Linking Gallopade classes with an educational platform, like Clever or Schoology, also saw friction.
Failing to add course content to a class.
The interface that allowed teachers to add course content to their classes caused confusion due to an additional confirmation step that teachers would miss before proceeding through the flow.
Process
Designing low fidelity wireframes to rapidly ideate solutions for the course setup experience.
I explored divergent user flows to map out different solutions to the course setup experience. Flows were drafted for both the integrated and non-integrated courses, and then strengths and weakness were identified for each one. A solution I proposed to the team was moving away from the step model and trying combining the two steps to reduce complexity. I also verfiied with engineering on the possibility of having classes added to the teacher’s account automatically if it has been assigned by an admin. That way we can remove an additional step that the teacher has to be responsible for.
After aligning with the Gallopade team on a direction for the design, I brought the user flow into high fidelity to prepare a prototype for usability testing.
The goal was to test a linear prototype for a course that needed to be integrated with an SSO. This was identified as being the more common use case, so I collaborated with our researcher to outline tasks and questions to help validate our designs. Gallopade’s CX team helped with recruiting four teachers who were current Gallopade Curriculum users to participate in a guided usability test.
The redesign received positive reception from teachers, with some voicing their excitement for the improved experience.
Other than some adjustments to microcopy to resolve confusion encountered during testing, the redesigned course setup flow proved to be easier for teachers to use when linking to an SSO and assigning course content to their classes. After findings from research were presented to the client, I began work on finalizing the designs and drafting the specifications. Specifications were scaled to what the Gallopade team required for their developers.
Impact
The redesign of the course setup experience led to a 42% reduction in per-capita help searches and 75% drop in views for the course setup help article.
Queries evolved from “can’t find course” to feature-specific requests like “hide courses” and “how to release grades,” revealing that teachers had moved past onboarding and were now struggling with advanced course management and grading controls.
Reflection
This was the time I got to work on a EdTech product primarily focused on the K-8 space. This client was new to working with a UX team, so it was interesting collaborating with a client that was used to years of engineering-led development. While we improved with time on how to communicate our methodologies and how we intended to collaborate with each other, we might have seen more benefit establishing our process from the beginning of the project.