Reporting and Data Visualization
My Role
User Experience Designer
Deliverables
Miro board draft, Figma mockup
Tools
Figma, Miro
Use case: Student Report
Provide end-users with the data required to understand how is the student performing and engaging in their courses: student's progress per course, student's activity, participation and engagement, and student's performance by grades.
Understanding the problem
To build a report that truly meets user needs, we first validated the key data points and the main reason users consult data about a single student.
To frame this, I used the Questions To Be Answered (QTBA) approach proposed by Ben Dexter Cooley. Unlike a typical product flow, where users complete a task and leave, people use data reports to explore. They come with a question in mind, and the answer often leads to a new one. QTBA starts from those questions rather than from a linear flow, which made it a natural fit for a reporting product.
Based on prior interviews and follow-up validation with focus groups, we defined the main questions the report needed to answer:
How is this student progressing in each of their courses? → progress per course
Is this student actively engaging with course content? → activity and participation
Has their engagement changed over time? → activity trend across the term
How are they performing in terms of grades? → performance by grades
Each question became a section of the report and set a clear goal for every visualization: if a chart didn’t help answer one of these questions, it didn’t belong in the report.
Exploring and creating
With the QTBAs as our guide, the content designer and I worked together so that the storytelling and visual patterns clearly answered each question. We iterated on how users read and interpret data on screen and made sure data and chart descriptions were clear and understandable.
Alongside this, we held weekly syncs with the cross-functional team to stay aligned on the project’s goals and planning.
Materializing
Eventually, as an ongoing effort to validate with real users, the report was released to a closed group of institutions to get feedback on the final report before releasing it for general availability.
Learn more about Anthology Illuminate at https://www.anthology.com/products/institutional-intelligence/anthology-illuminate
