What at first seemed like an interesting UI/UX position in an IT company with offices in Slovenia turned from just designing for web to me completely turning the look of this company internally and externally.

Working on several web app designs closely with the product owner, marketing team, customer success, QA and devs, I could be describe my role in a number of ways; from UX researcher, product and UI/UX designer.

About the company

This California-based EdTech company provides a complete school student safety solution, combined with content filtering on their devices (so they can eliminate the bad content on kids’ screens) and an advanced classroom management interface for effective 1:1 teacher-student communication for (in big part) USA schools. Their solutions includes interfaces for the whole school environment from system administrators of school districts to principals, teachers, students and event parents on multi-OS web and mobile devices.

My work as a UI/UX designer at Blocksi

My work after working closely with the PO, marketing team, SEO, copywriters, growth, customer success and product team, led to a set of different deliverables to several teams.

Designing features’ UI/UX for 4 dashboards and 3 mobile apps for mainly 4 target personas and the end user – the K-12 student. I created a design repository and design systems for solutions that are serving mainly 3 target personas – the school administrators, delegates and teachers, which all have their own dashboard for managing their tasks.

Research

First, I had to get to know the company and made tons of research within definition of personas, user flows, and journeys in Miro. Getting to know this whole new market to me was a journey itself, since the one-on-one solutions in K-12 school districts for keeping student safe online were quite new to me at that time.

But most of all, after defining personas and user flows, the whole product, marketing and development teams gained tons of valuable info about who we are addressing and whose problems we are solving and how we might make that in the best possible way. While having the company teams spread across the world, this was a huge breakthrough for company operations.

From UI/UX to product design

With new features requests on dashboards for IT admins, delegates and teachers, I worked on designing solutions, considering the end users and current user flows for web and mobile apps, having in mind the value that a feature will bring to the end user, combined with consistent design. I did quite a lot of analysis of the current solutions and how they’re handled and solved from the developer’s side and how users use the interface to be able to continue providing the same experience or enhance it, where possible.

Using Adobe XD and Figma, I designed mockups, prototypes and shared Loom videos to be able to present the solutions to the product owner and test before delivering the final specifications to developers after the product owner’s approval in an agile work environment using Scrum Sprints in Jira.

Working with AI in the UI/UX process

I worked on planning and designing mostly new features, finding solutions to enhance the existing experience (UI/UX). At least two of all features that I worked on were incorporating custom AI tools into current dashboards and enhanced dashboards’ usability – the overall classroom experience on the teacher/student dashboard and the back part of whole solution ecosystem – the admin and delegate dashboards.

One of the AI-powered features was planning and design an AI chatbot for quick quiz generation for students.

The second AI-powered feature that I worked on was a plagiarism checker, which teachers can use to check if students used AI for their assignments.

How I contributed to end users with my work

I worked on features that enable:

• Worldwide school IT administrators to better manage school policies and filters on school-owned devices to prevent harmful online behavior, manage and track school inventory or lost/stolen devices
• Enable IT admins to set limits of what kind of online student behavior could be considered a threat and enable a proactive approach to deal with the situation on highly scalable levels (notifying parents, school authorities, police)
• Enable IT admins and delegates to immediately detect any signs of threats in school by monitoring all online behavior
• Enable IT admins to see which parents are involved in the process of maintaining a safe digital environment for their kids
• Enabling teachers to better manage their online classes, have a thorough view of what each student is doing and if he’s on track with the rest of the class
• Enabling teachers to better communicate and assist students through various channels

Additional to new features, I also worked enhancing the overall UI/UX by simultaneously designing better 404 pages, subscription limit reached messages, account expiration notifications and error pages. During my investigations, I found those to be significant for better user onboarding and a more pleasant user experience.

I like to look at the products wider, how they are used, who uses them and what’s the overall experience of any kind of communication with the company’s products. Therefore, working with the PO, product marketer, the QA team and developers was my everyday routine.

How I contributed to the company

Systematisation of work processes

For being able to effectively track workload, work flows, people and tasks throughout all teams, I created numerous documents to guide the whole team and align with focus on delivering the most important tasks first and on time, even before we had the agile Sprint planning system for better task management and transparency.

Conclusion

The value I see in this collaboration was creating a better world for the whole school ecosystem, from IT administrators, to principals, teachers and their dashboards, students and also parents as a vital element for keeping and maintaining a safe environment for kids.

With all work done on-site with part of the team in EU and most in US time zones, working in this fast-paced environment, I am happy to have gained an enormous amount of experience while learning about how EdTech solutions can keep kids in school safe from harmful behaviour like shootings, cyberbullying, threats and suicides.

Curious about more?

I also redesigned the company’s identity, an internal app and the website.

Click here to check more about Blocksi’s logo and brand identity redesign:
➤ https://ajda.gregorcic.eu/portfolios/brand-identity-redesign/

Click here to check out more about Blocksi’s website redesign:
➤ https://ajda.gregorcic.eu/portfolios/blocksi-website-redesign/