Streamlining task organization to boost student engagement.
Canvas — a redesign.
Role
UI/UX designer
Timeline
3 week sprint
What I did
User research
Usability testing
Tools
Figma
Google forms
Canvas is a widely used educational platform designed to facilitate course management and enhance communication between students and instructors.
How can canvas be improved for students who use it daily to keep track of their coursework?
The challenge 🏔️...
Sneak peak of the final design
Low usability rating of existing features
User research
3.63 overall practicality rating of the Canvas application (scale from 1-5).
2.86 usability rating of Canvas ‘calendar’ feature (on a scale from 1-5).
Over 74% of respondents reference the ‘to-do’ feature and note challenges with its organization of pending tasks.
Our team surveyed 50+ students — ranging from high school to college — who have all utilized the educational platform Canvas to learn more about their experience with the application.
Restructuring task organizational system
Ideation
Canvas is a comprehensive platform, which displays lecture content, assignments, exams, and grades of the various courses students take. Consequently, Canvas needs to manage a large number of assignments across different courses, each with their own deadlines. We found that this often leads to the Calendar and To-Do List features to become flooded with information. Therefore, despite their utility, these features are rarely used.
Our team proposed a solution to restructure Canvas’s task organizational system, sorting assignments & events by courses in drop-down tabs that can be opened and closed, making it more readable and reducing students' cognitive load as they can more easily navigate through upcoming deadlines.
Designing for user intuition
Usability testing
“this button icon is unclear.”
“this button icon is not very clear.”
“what does this page lead to?”
“how do i get to the assignments details page from the to-do list?”
Our team asked our target audience to move through our designs on their own and let us know their impressions. Taking their comments into account, we adjusted our designs accordingly.
a comprehensive platform that connects users to volunteer events catered towards their goals.
...the 🙌 final product
Canvas redesigned
Final prototype
This redesign centered around restructuring the organization of tasks by course and by deadline to minimize the appearance of overwhelming information.
01. Following an existing style guide
For this redesign, our team made the decision to stick to Canvas's original style guide — following the brand's color palette, icons, and text — to focus on redesigning specific features instead of reworking the entire application. Working with an existing style guide was a new experience for me and required our team to make design choices that looked cohesive with Canvas's original style.
Reflections 💡