Promethean, Inc. provides interactive education technology solutions. The company offers education software, interactive whiteboards, learner response systems, interactive tools, and classroom audio tools. Promethean's ActivEngage essentially duplicates and enhances the functionality of Learner Response Systems (LRS devices) like ActivExpression for use on mobile, tablet, and other web-connected devices; allowing students to choose or create answers to questions posed by the teacher and send their answers to the front-of-classroom lesson presentation software for viewing by the teacher or the whole class. Teachers can ask questions of a variety of types: True/False, Multiple Choice, Equations, Numbers, Free Response, Likert Scale, Sort in Order. Questions can be ad-hoc facilitations of choice without content, or teachers can prepare questions and answer choices ahead of time and present students with a self-paced set of questions, as with a quiz. Students have the ability to name their device to identify their answers. ActivEngage is dependent on use with ActivInspire, Promethean's legacy desktop presentation software.

   Strategically, it helps Promethean keep up with the surge of usage of tablets in schools and " bring your own device." It allows schools to better leverage the devices they already have. It facilitates an environment that mixes use of LRS hardware with mobile, tablet, & desktop.

My level of engagement changed over the course of the project. At first the ActivEngage 2 project was to be a purely technical transition, (software engineering re-platform for stability and easier integration with existing and future software) with some purely superficial visual design changes to update branding, look and feel. However, as the development team re-interpreted the old version of the software, some problems in usability arose. Given these factors alongside addition of a few new features, I was invited to work with the team to make some improvements. Rather than doing a complete redesign, we had to piece together a number of small improvements to UI, with the aim of revisiting the problem space and the overall user experience with a future pending product iteration. We made several updates, highlighted below: connecting to a lesson, navigating between multiple questions in a single assessment, and the interactions for different kinds of answers themselves.

 

 

Competitive review, comparative review, comparing old solution and new solution. School visit to view existing software being used by teachers and students. My UX design efforts were focused on three key areas. The first was the students' process of getting connected with the teacher's lesson. The second was navigation for students between multiple questions in the self-paced assessment scenario. The third was a series of modifications to answer input for three of the more complicated question types. I created design specifications that got the developers started, and then worked closely with them to iterate where needed, and also worked with the Quality Assurance team to anticipate any problems with the either the original design or its implementation.

 

Helping students find their teacher's session securely on the network was very tricky, and the flow is different for different users. Because the way schools wire student access varies widely by implementation according to school size, internet connectivity, security, network setup etcetera, different students might see only certain UI's in the flow per given
use. The series of steps thus had to be modular.

 

 

We made improvements to this answer type by employing more natural mapping and using native patterns. The new design also allows for textual descriptions, accounting for the varying lengths teachers may input as choices when they create questions in ActivInspire.

We made improvements to this answer type by employing more natural mapping and using native patterns. The new design also allows for textual descriptions, accounting for the varying lengths teachers may input as choices when they create questions in ActivInspire. When I was invited to opine, I did some study for various ways of implementing Likert, and in the end, arrived at a design very similar to the original, and just helped to make sure the developers
were able to capture that same level of usability in the re-platform.

 

 

 

Initial feedback from field trials across three countries were very positive, and sales for ActivEngage 2 were company's strongest for software in Summer 2013.