Supporting school teams with student referrals
I led the evolution of a new referrals feature that allows educators to better perform MTSS processes all in the same place within Student Success.
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
2 months for MVP
Team
1 Product Manager, 3-4 Engineers, 1 Engineering Manager
Impact & outcomes
To stay competitive, new ways of supporting educators and districts in MTSS implementation had to be incorporated.
Panorama Education’s Student Success platform supports Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS), a framework that many districts are using to support their students academically, behaviorally, emotionally, and socially.
MTSS teams identify students who need support, respond through discussion and implementation of interventions, monitor intervention progress, and improve the efficacy of student supports through ongoing evaluations.
In-person user research revealed gaps in our tool suite that didn’t support how schools and districts ran their processes in real life.
While educators were able to identify students that need support through Panorama, but mostly use external tools to collaborate through the student support triage process. Their experience utilizing multiple tools to complete tasks was disjointed, leading to more time spent on administrative operations rather than student support.
There was an opportunity not only to bridge process gaps but also to create new ways of activating and engaging users.
While collaborative features would be a huge value add for MTSS teams, they required a bit more research and was also too complex in scope to build at the time. PM & I saw an opportunity to address a specific aspect of the MTSS process that so far has not been served by Student Success: referring a student for discussion during Student Support Team meetings.
I utilized several research methods to inform the most appropriate requirements for the first iteration.
Secondary research
I collected examples of referral forms from many school districts to understand their commonalities and differences, so that we could extract the most important elements for our MVP.
Card sort & survey
I came up with a primary list of questions to include on the form. I asked users to rank these questions based on their level of importance. I also asked additional questions to test against my initial assumptions.
Expert consulting
I proactively consulted our resident MTSS and data science expert to understand how to incorporate MTSS best practices into the referral form. This helped make sense of user feedback and prioritize their actionability.
A simple MVP was built out with scalability in mind, knowing that it would be built on gradually.
Workflow pattern users already know
In a prior redesign that I led, I introduced the pattern of using a table component to manage list-based pages with actions. Having this pattern readily available made it much more efficient for Engineering to implement referrals.
Simplest version of a referral form
The referral form contained a compilation of questions that were formed through user research and consulting with our in-house MTSS expert. As a first pass, it was good enough to bring value while setting the foundations for future iterations.
How to prioritize the most impactful improvements?
Through user interviews and product feedback, I evaluated user pain points with the current referrals iteration. I also tested newer concepts such as assigning a referral to a team member, multiple and additional form options, saving a referral as a draft, and collaborative referral notes.
Further research highlighted more nuance and more complexity that was crucial to understand.
Referral process specificity is heavily dependent on the districts’ and schools’ MTSS maturity.
Some districts have strict guidelines about the data that has to be filled out, while others do not have specific data requirements at all. While there are district mandated processes, schools can also have their own ways of managing referrals. There appeared to be a bigger need for configurability.
Workflows are collaborative and require flexibility for different contexts.
Referrals can be filled out by a single staff member, a collaborative team, or by a staff member for a certain speciality. School teams want to share context with each other while making room for specific workflows designated to special staff. Referrals are also reviewed mostly by teams, in line with best practices.
Confidentiality is important.
Student referrals that dealt with sensitive matters were meant for certain staff only — guidance counselors, social workers, and not meant for all educators with access to the student’s profile.
Users want to be notified when a referral is submitted.
Not knowing when a referral has been submitted has been cited as a pain point for participants, and in the case of a few clients, a barrier to adoption.
The referrals feature, alongside my understanding of our users and clients, continued to evolve.
Email notifications
Through both product feedback and user interviews, users expressed that they wanted to be notified for important referral related actions. Based on product strategy and engineering considerations, this was the next priority for improving the referrals feature.
Email notifications were then added for 3 scenarios: when a referral is submitted, when a referral has been reviewed, and when referrals have been ‘pending’ for over a week.
Configurable referrals
The lack of flexibility in the referrals form was a top barrier to adoption for multiple clients. Knowing that configurable form platform capabilities would serve multiple feature areas, I envisioned the long-term strategy of what configurable forms could look like for not only referrals but 2 other feature areas.
While a staff engineer on my team led the technical strategy, I designed a system with scalable components to support the same structures.
School team collaboration
Previous user research suggested that collaboration was a huge part of MTSS processes that were ultimately less reflected in our platform capabilities. I tested new design concepts that involved team collaboration:
Adding notes to a referral
Assigning a referral to a team member
Saving a referral as a draft so that multiple staff members can include notes on it
I learned the delicate balance between long term thinking and short term execution — accounting for both yet designing the best solution with what is in front of us.
Think about all the touchpoints, the whole customer journey
The investment of MTSS implementation from a key leader impacted how well features get adopted, utilized, or understood across schools.
How might we incorporate service design principles into our strategy?
Complex cross discipline strategy requires incremental efforts
To truly meet our users’ complex needs, our features needed to be scalable across multiple scenarios, and therefore required investments in configurability at a company level.
How might we scaffold complex long term technical strategy into design process?