Reducing busywork for tutor teams

to get the best outcomes for students

My role

Product Designer

User interviews, usability tests, information architecture, UI design, prototyping in Figma, stakeholder alignment, handoff

Team context

I work alongside a fellow Product Designer, under the direction of a Design Lead and in collaboration with the PLUS Managing Director.

Status and Timeframe

Currently prepping for handoff to devs

Jan. 2025 – Present

Overview

PLUS Personalized Learning serves nearly 3,000 low-income students with math instruction from 500+ tutors. The PLUS tutor supervisor team loses hours each week to busywork and manual processes. They need an automated, efficient solution to focus on what they do best.

Outcome

My team updated an existing tutor admin dashboard that had low adoption among supervisors, significantly increasing their reported comfort with the PLUS app. We streamlined dashboard screens, incorporated AI-powered data visualizations, and aligned with the robust PLUS design system.

Jump to screens

Background

A tutor supervisor is like an air traffic controller

They must monitor multiple sessions and respond to learning needs as they unfold simultaneously.

As such, the information they need to do their jobs comes from a wide range of sources.

My data flow model for tutor supervision.

Understand

“We’re losing half of our data.”

Supervisors are buried in manual tasks, making it hard to stay on top of tutor responsibilities.

One supervisor told us how she has to individually confirm that all tutors have uploaded their session recordings for review. While she struggles to stay on top of this, the tutors only upload about half of what they’re supposed to.

The existing dashboard is just another thing to monitor.

Tutor supervisors reported spending only a couple of hours on the PLUS dashboard per week, mainly for sending mass emails. They didn’t see how it improved on their existing processes.

The existing, low-adoption tutor supervisor dashboard

The Problem

Tutor supervisors lack a reliable source for information about tutor performance.

Where do they currently find information?

In Slack messages, Excel spreadsheets, and in their heads. That means they can only make decisions reactively because information is never readily at hand.

How might we equip supervisors with data to make decisions proactively and predict outcomes?

Problem statement:

Scoping

How do we balance our dreams against our constraints?

Our dreams:

Tutor supervisors can conduct all of their work in the PLUS app, with no need for other tools such as Slack

Our constraints:

Time: We need to ship files by the dev team’s deadline for updating our dashboard.
User hesitancy: Our users prefer lots of information and education before getting comfortable with major UI changes.

We prioritized design updates that would boost tutor confidence in the PLUS app and improve their day-to-day work. We’re planning for a second phase to build on our improvements with AI.

Phase 1 (shipping now):

Incorporate data visualizations and tutor performance metrics into the dashboard
Align UI with PLUS design system and UX design best practices

Sneak peek at our scoping conversations

Dividing the design work into two phases

Phase 2 (up next):

Explore AI-powered features that will help supervisors with proactive decision-making about the tutors they manage

Information Architecture

Supervisors have specific questions about tutors, and they need answers fast.

We can streamline the supervisor workflow by making info about tutoring sessions easier to find.

Before

Existing dashboard with my annotations from supervisor interviews

After

Updated dashboard with my annotated improvements

Design System

Incorporating the extensive PLUS design system

We leveraged existing patterns when making decisions about usability, efficiency, and aesthetics. Here are just a few examples of how we did it.

Adapting a modal

I adapted the design system’s customizable modal when I was asked to connect our dashboard with specific details about each tutoring session.

Modals as seen in the PLUS design system

My modal for tutoring session details

Replacing a navigation item that didn’t work for our users

The design system provides several types of navigation items, including clickable dropdowns – which our audience didn’t realize were clickable. We decided to reorganize the content so that only one menu item type would be needed.

Before: Supervisors didn’t realize this nav item was clickable.

After: we reorganized content so that we could constrain ourselves to one menu item type from the design system

Choosing a pagination variant

The design system allows for multiple sizes and styles of pagination. In consultation with the design system team, we chose the medium-sized, unlabeled version for cohesiveness with similar dashboards elsewhere in the product.

Pagination variants in the PLUS design system

Pagination as seen in our dashboard

UI Refinement

Mapping all possible states of each table cell

With annotations for developers.

Paring down the data visualizations

Before:

Supervisors feel overwhelmed by the visualizations and immediately scroll past them.

After:

We identified the most useful visualizations for each page in interviews with supervisors. Fewer visualizations, redesigned to take up less vertical space, orient without overwhelming.

Here’s a closer look at our decision-making:

Rewriting confusing labels

How it started…

How it went…

How it ended:

Ensuring responsiveness across 4 breakpoints

Pivot

Supervisor interviews didn’t tell the whole story.

PM feedback revealed gaps in our understanding of the problem, which we were able to address in under a week.

During our research interviews, tutor supervisors discussed many issues with how they access data – but didn’t mention that they are responsible for creating much of the data themselves.

We ran a CRUD analysis with the PM to identify where and when supervisors create, read, update, and delete data. As a result of this analysis, I created a new Edit Tutor modal giving supervisors full control of tutor data in one place.