Fall 2019
Easelly Redesign
Bringing new life to a tried and tested design tool that excels in creating infographics and compelling visuals.
Fall 2019
Bringing new life to a tried and tested design tool that excels in creating infographics and compelling visuals.
Easelly is a infographic builder that creates vibrant, engaging visuals without the need of any preexisting design skills. It makes good use of editable templates to get users moving quickly and provides a similar level of design capability to Google Slides.
Easelly has three main user demographics—Enterprise level companies, small business, and teachers. However, the bulk of user frustration came exclusively from the third category, with teachers also accounting for the largest percentage of customer churn.
User Research Lead
UX/UI Designer
Our team was given three weeks to learn why teachers were so frustrated with Easelly and to create a set of UX best practices and design guidelines to address their grievances and inform Easelly's design moving forward.
We utilized the following techniques to develop a thorough understanding of the problem:
We spoke to teachers and asked them about their experiences with Easelly to better understand the issues they were having and how they dealt with them.
Our team created an "assignment" and had five teachers complete it to judge how quickly educators could learn Easelly's functionality and put it to use.
We took a look at Easelly's three closest competitors: Google Slides, Canva, and Visme to assess where Easelly stood out and potential gaps in their product that were hindering growth.
Looking at Easelly as design professionals, we were able to judge the platform against ten standards set forth by Jakob Neilson to assess whether or not it held up.
Our research quickly led us to three key themes:
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Covid threw teachers into the deep and had them scrambling to transfer their curriculums from in-person to online. Whatever online tools they chose to use had to be simple, so they could quickly teach their students how to use them.
If students couldn't figure something out, more often then not they would just give up on the assignment all together. The ability to quickly remedy mistakes needed to be brought to the forefront of any design solutions.
The time taken to complete a task was of huge importance for both the teachers and their students. For teachers, they looked to complete assignment building quickly as they had a lot on their plates already, and students lacked the attention span to engage in extended tasks.
Taking all this into account, our team agreed that the best path forward was to strip down Easelly's existing interface, and create a more streamlined version that was more easily learned and used by the students, which would relieve pressure on the teachers who were constantly troubleshooting for them.
After presenting our research findings to Easelly's CEO, we quickly began crafting on a solution. We looked through Easelly's existing information architecture and decided that our best bet was to go with a "what you see is what you get" approach. After several rounds of iterating, we accomplished this by:
1. Brining any relevant functionality out of the file, edit, view menu bar.
2. Adding a help feature that would connect users to an Easelly chatbot.
While the nature of our approach had us remove some Easelly's existing functionality, we were able to look back on our research where we not only asked teachers what the most valuable tools within the platform were to them, but also we saw evidence of this when they completed the mock "assignment" in our contextual analysis. Additionally, we looked to our competitive analysis to make sure we Easelly was still in line with other leading design platforms.
We conducted five user tests with teachers to see if our designs adequately responded to their needs. For the interviews, we were seeking mostly qualitative data from the teachers, their “gut reactions” to our product. For quantitative data, our team performed a systems usability scale assessment, sending out surveys to the participants of the usability tests, as well as the contextual inquiries. This allowed us to see if users felt our designs actually offered an improvement over the existing Easelly platform.
1. Liked the simplified layout for students, but it would be best for 3rd-8th graders
2. Not to fold the tools into other menu options, they wanted everything visible as that what would work best for their students
3. They wanted us to rethink the quad tool, as the options on it should be so close to each other
4. Some of the iconography, mainly the “help” tool, may be confusing for the students
With this feedback in mind we made our final iterations to the design:
Click here to see our annotated wireframes!After a presentation of our findings to the client and design management, we completed our handoff to Easelly which included thorough documentation of all our work and a final report of our findings that of what the UX best practices were and how they might look should they be implemented.
If we had more time, my team and I would have loved to up the fidelity and functionality of our prototype, at times it was hard for the teachers clicking through it to grasp that it was not a finished product. We then would have undertaken another round of user testing to see if the iterations from our first round of testing proved effective.
Previous case study:
Medium