Canvas
Overview
Adapting Canvas's existing features to reflect real student workflows: with more intuitive deadline tracking organized by course, easy to-do check-lists, and options to clear irrelevant notifications.
Timeline
3 weeks, 2023
Role
UI/UX Design Fellow
Team
3 Designers
Skills
User Interviews
UI/UX Design
Sneak peek of the final design.
Context
Canvas’s original application
Canvas is a widely used educational platform that primarily serves universities, colleges, and K–12 institutions. It was designed to facilitate course management and increase engagement in digital learning.
Its capabilities include assignment submissions, grading, discussion boards, and messaging between students and with instructors.
Canvas’s planning gap
Canvas's strength lies in course management, as it excels at structuring course content (centralizing course documents, deadlines, and assignment submissions).
However it falls short in supporting student engagement, specifically in managing deadlines and priorities, where the existing design creates friction in students' workflows.
Understanding the user
Understanding user groups
After speaking with fellow undergraduates and taking into account my team's personal experiences with the platform, we discovered the To-Do and Calendar pages seemed to be the root of the issue.
Ideation
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.
Design roadblocks
Creative trade-offs
Because Canvas is an already established platform with many strengths, extensive changes aren’t feasible. Therefore, in order to refine existing features and create a seamless experience, our team had to work within constraints on design style and structure.
Our decision-making
Working within Canvas’s established design system, we leveraged existing elements across the platform while also introducing a new task management structure.
For instance, the redesigned To-Do page is a blend of the dashboard layout with the existing task list, creating a cohesive and familiar experience for users.
Revised task-management flow
As aforementioned, the updated task-management page organizes tasks and deadlines by course, allowing users to check off items as they complete them. This system reduces cognitive load of preventing students from seeing all their tasks, across all their courses, all at once, with task notifications persisting until their deadlines.
This organizational system is also extended to the calendar page, providing students' with a day-by-day perspective of pending tasks and events, while also allowing users to add custom entries for greater control and planning.
Canvas — redesigned.
Streamlining task organization to boost student engagement.
By de-cluttering Canvas with task-based organization, students are able to...
Post-project take-aways
Designing without reinventing
My team and I's redesign intentionally preserved Canvas's existing style guide to maintain brand consistency while targeting specific feature improvements. This constraint-driven approach forced us to innovate within Canvas's design language so our changes felt intuitive rather than disruptive. For me, I learned how adjusting UI didn't mean sacrificing visual cohesion.