Pearson Collections

Pearson Collections Mobile App

Role UI / UX Design Company Pearson Project Mobile Application

Objective

Challenge

Create a mobile experience where students could consume, download, and mark-up digital textbook content.

When I was first hired at Pearson, a small, young UX team was formed across the United States to digitize the student experience. The Pearson Collections project was a pilot that needed to hit the market in an expedited timeline before the fall semester began. The largest challenge was the backend work of formatting traditional textbooks for mobile as well as accommodating students' modern classroom needs from a small device.

UX Process

We did a few rounds of user testing with remote students to see how they would react to our preliminary layouts. We were specifically A/B testing on how students access their course materials: through course names or through the textbook itself. UX was so new at Pearson during this time, that we were creating wireframes for the first time.

Approach

Overall Outcome

We learned in user testing that students wanted to access their coursework from the course itself, so we designed the navigation around course names. We were confident in developing the wires after a few small adjustments. We had to design for both mobile operating systems, and we decided to design for iOS first, so that we could launch an entire platform at a time. After the iOS mobile and tablet designs were implemented, I pivoted over to designs for Android. Luckily, our development team was able to scale from mobile to tablet with speed and minimal direction. We essentially launched the pilot within a few months for iOS and Android, mobile and tablet versions. We had a few hundred screens designed by the time the app went out to our users.

The pilot went out to a small group of college students in the fall of 2016. We were able to successfully deliver course content to user's phones with little-to-no issues. Digital reading scored high from a usability standpoint and students loved being able to read their assignments from their mobile devices on-the-go. We also learned that they appreciated not having to carry multiple, heavy textbooks across campus so we were glad to have literally "lightened their load".