COMPANY Meraki
DURATION About 3.5 weeks
CONTRIBUTION Individual Contributor
Meraki relies on volunteer tutors who take classes for the Python and Spoken English learning tracks on Meraki. There had been a rudimentary system to monitor the tutors who joined Meraki but the process has been largely manual. From getting the tutors, onboarding them and monitoring the data, it has been a tremendous manual exercise.
The first request came from the Operations team and composed of the following:
The current data table looked like this
It was only an online data table in name. The admins had tutor data in excel sheets which were provided to developers to update the table every month. How cumbersome is that? Plus, there is no management of tutors possible, whatsoever here.
Anyhow, I needed to dig deeper into the problem points.
The Operations team is small. Two of its members were involved in managing our tutors. I went for user interviews in this case. The plan was also to have them to showcase how they did their work. Since, their work is done almost online, it served to be an observational study in context.
Recruitment: It was very easy. I scheduled the calls directly through Slack as they are my co-workers. The number of participants seems small at 2 but in this case, these two people were the target audience who would be using the tool. So, I think the usual standard of having multiple participants wouldn't apply here.
Interview channel: Over Google Meets
I conducted semi-structured interviews. The below questions were used for initiating the talk and then probing further as the answers came along.
Raw highlights from the interviews with the admins:
We recruit tutors by publicizing a Google forms. The resulting campaigns give us a long list of people to work with.
We contact the tutors and if the interest match is there, we match them to a batch of students.
We share the data of onboarded tutors to the dev team for updating the data table.
All management of tutors like regularity in taking classes or getting informed of their status is done and maintained manually over calls and messages and updated in excel sheets.
Too much time is wasted in shuffling through various sources of information and thinking about what next to do in relation to tutors.
In the event of needing tutor data reports for the past months, we have to approach the dev team to generate it for us.
Actionable insights with decisions:
I was now sure that the admins need a central data location of all tutors with their teaching details and contact information so it's easy to connect with them from one place rather than shuffling through different files.
There was a need to design a system of assigning statuses to the tutors.
To further reduce the manual work and interaction with devs, a report generation system was needed that could also adapt to any filters or search applied to the data table.
Based on the insights and what needed to be done, the sitemap resulted in this:
Four task flows were identified based on the most important tasks that our admins perform and would be happy if those tasks are performed well:
I created a prototype of all these taskflows which was tested with the two admins from the Operations team. Sessions were held over Google Meets and I asked them share the screen in order to observe what they do and think out loud. I also asked them to describe their experience doing the tasks post the test. Some of the insights from the sessions were:
To work on adding a detailed information screen that could help admins monitor all classes from the past batches of the tutor.
Figure out a way to show actionable insights to the admins. For eg., if a tutor misses at least two classes in a row, admin gets an insight and option to connect with the tutor.
Uncovering new challenges and analysis of tasks when learning with classes and self study material
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