Team Assignment
Online degree is one of Coursera's biggest new initiatives in 2006. Team assignment is the essential requirement to provide high engagment learning and teaching experience for Groups (cohorts) to make Coursera's online degree programme attractive to learners and partners.
Understanding User Mental Model
Team assignment covered multiple critical workflows and introduced several major new features to Groups UI, including custom content creation, team management, high-touch learner engagement, and progress monitor on Group dashboard. Therefore the first step of the project was to design the systematic and functional foundation for product interactions. The IA was designed in order to make task-completion and wayfinding easy and natural. The decisions were made based on task breakdown, card sorting exercise, user research, and several feedback sessions, designed to understand user mental models.
Detailed task analysis in parallel to mapping out user journey with primary motivations for each step helped simplify the complexity of the system. These diagrams were shared with the stakeholders to share the context and help developers understand the higher-level story that pulls individual widgets togerher.
Concept to product
The next step was putting it into sketches and lo-fid wireframes. The wireframes went through 5 rapid iterations over the period of 2 weeks based on internal feedback and external user tests. Built on top of the fundamental IA, the navigation between pages was designed to anticipate the natural flow of tasks and give the user shortcuts to get to the tasks.
The Result
I'm currently working on high-fidelity comps. Team assignment is planned to be piloted in April as the key part of the high engagement online iMBA degree courser that Coursera offers in partnership with University of Illinois.