Navigating Constraint In a Learning Management System
You won’t hear “education” and “overfunding” in the same sentence too often, and this client—a government contractor providing training and certification to early-childhood educators—was no exception. Years of adding to a tangle of free tools and services had left them with a convoluted experience and job security for their help desk.
They found budget to bring in a designer for less than a month. With a new problem space to learn, a tight timeline, and an intricate web of dependencies to sort through, this was shaping up to be the best three weeks of my year.
My Role: I worked with stakeholders to understand key tasks and users needs, collaborated closely with developers to understand constraints, and created visual designs of the future state.
Boundless Constraints
We knew there would be limitations: No changes to data structures; authentication was provided by a third party, on a separate site; and most of the site was not changing, which meant updated pages needed to flow naturally with less-than-ideal experiences.
To understand these constraints and vet solutions, I collaborated daily with our lead developer throughout the engagement.
Same Bricks, New House
The site didn’t need to do anything new, it just needed to do everything better. With limited time, we focused most of our efforts on the classroom page. Key changes included:
Creating a new section for quick access to overarching resources like syllabi and instructor info.
Reordering the page based on when the content is needed—readings first, then assignments in order of due date.
Using icons, cards, and typography to create a clean, scannable experience.
Sleight of Hand-off
Among the many integrations and handoffs, about half of their courses were hosted on a separate site and iframed in. To ensure the process was smooth and inspired trust, I worked with the lead developer to devise a series of invisible “hot swaps.” We weren’t able to eliminate every hiccup, but we were able to make it feel like one experience, not two.