Marking Online Examinations Re-design
Project Objectives
This is a project that I took full ownership of in July 2021. The problem brief was to redesign a marking module for online examinations. The project was substantial in size so it had to be broken down into an MVP and split into different phased releases.
The core priorities that were essential to the customer are:
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The Cost: the need for markers to complete marking tests as quickly as possible so they don’t pay excessive wages.
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Consistency: ensuring markers are all marking consistently, are following marking guidelines, and not subjective biases.
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Quality: to monitor the quality of markers and to identify those who are not following the guidelines and either train them or prevent them from marking.
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Ease of Use: less time and effort to train Markers to lower training and onboarding costs.
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*Disclaimer: Some of the information had to be modified for confidentiality purposes of the business and the customer.
Research
I spoke to Project Managers in the company and they informed me of all of the different pain points that the customer had with the existing marking feature. With this knowledge and referring to the problem brief for the project, I began to look online at examples of online marking features. There weren't many useful examples but I took a lot of inspiration for presenting information in areas with very little real estate and also online test builders and academic sites.
I found storyboarding was an extremely quick and efficient way of piecing together the user journey for this project to validate it with the engineering leads before I spent a lot of time creating the high fidelity designs. In the past, I spent a lot of time doing hi-fi mockups very early into the project and it would result in a lot of re-work because the engineering teams decided the solution we were proposing could not be delivered on time or that it would take multiple sprints instead of the set amount of sprints they planned for. This was frustrating at times to find out the work I was doing was not realistic in order to meet deadlines, but we found the storyboard process worked for all parties and teams involved which was a success.
Explorations
In the early stages of discovery and research, I came up with some design concepts as a possible solution for the problem we were trying to solve. In the end, time constraints were the biggest factor in having to change the idea. Our engineering team simply could not deliver all of the requirements within the given scope, so the product had to be cut severely.
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Below are some examples of the first iteration of the New Marking Module before it was shown to engineers and the customer.
This concept was for the main Marker Dashboard. The initial idea was the ability for the Marker to be able to view all the questions they needed to mark in one place, and choose which questions they wanted to mark first.
This concept of the Marking Panel shows where a marker could give questions the appropriate mark and assign it a tag if they felt it was applicable to the Candidate's answer.
3 Amigos and Customer Validation
It was very useful to have had these sessions with Product and Engineering before meeting with the customer because when we finally validated it with them, it ensured the work I was doing was deliverable within the scope by engineering and exactly what the customer needed. I enjoyed the collaboration with the multiple teams and the customer but it was challenging at times cutting designs that I knew would be beneficial to Markers but would increase the scope significantly.
User Testing and Regression
Unfortunately, throughout this project there was a limited amount of usability testing that I could conduct due to time constraints and delivery dates. Testing sometimes occurred after the feature was deployed and we then had to carry out testing and regressions on the live product. This was frustrating at times because even though we knew the feature met the business requirements and the customer was able to use it well, it didn't mean that a Marker was going to have the same experience.
Final Solution
This was my first large scale project that I took full ownership of. It was a very large and complex project and majority of the time it has been very challenging in terms of understanding the requirements and designing not just for the customer and the user but also designing the feature in such a way that makes it easier to deliver the MVP on time by the engineering team.
Below is an example of a User Flow I created for a Marker to gain a wider perspective on all of the actions they can take on the application. This is just a fragment of the project that I have been working on. I found creating this User Flow really helped me to gain a better understanding of the bigger picture of the project because it was broken down in so many phases over the past year and a half.
Sprint by sprint, the Marking Module has been redesigned and improved and we are continuously adding more features to this complex feature to ensure the best possible marking experience for our customers. As it is an ongoing project and some features are currently in production, please see below for some examples of what has currently been delivered to the customer by engineering.
These examples are showing the experience that a Marker has when Marking online examinations. They can see the Candidate's answer, they can give the question a score, view marking guidelines, leave comments and assign tags.
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