The lesson planner feature in the system has a huge potential to be a modular tool. It was built with basic functionality but we knew customers were needing more.

We market as being the all-in-one tool for teachers in the classroom so planning your day as a teacher is a crucial part of that workflow.

The feature as it stood was functional but limiting.

• Create lessons in a limited template
• Add lessons to a time of day
• Search for lessons that they have created in the past
• Customize or rearrange the time of day
• Print or share the supplies, weekly schedule or daily schedule

Current Lesson Planner Feature

After talking with a customer panel and our education team, we determined the biggest problems we had to solve for were:

• Our lesson planner template wasn't universal enough for all of our users.
• There was no easy way to manage your lessons and add them directly to your week

Considering this was a feature add-on and we weren’t starting from scratch, I wanted to understand how our current lesson planner maps and how these new features would fit in.

1. Designing a universal lesson template

The current lesson planner was built on a rigid framework that didn't allow custom lessons.

After talking with customers and understanding the needs in the classroom, the solution for the lesson template was to break the lesson down into the stages of when teachers need the information.

• ‍When deciding if they even want to use the lesson that day, the user only needs an "Overview" section of the lesson.
• When the user is in the classroom doing the lesson, they only need to focus on the step by step instructions.
• Finally, after completing the lesson, the user can add notes for reference next time. This solution makes it helpful for the user to not get overwhelmed with information when it's not needed.

I wanted the workflow of lesson creation and the output to match so the users have a similar UI and won't have to familiarize themselves with different interfaces.

We wanted the UI to match the order of the way the user would use it. This meant showing the overview at all times, being able to hide and show the individual steps, showing individualized instruction for students, and lastly only inputting notes in after the lesson.

2. Managing and adding lessons

The other problem we had to solve was managing and adding lessons easily to plan out their week. The only way to create new lessons was to do it right from the grid, so it restricted flexibility in changes throughout the week.

The solution was a simple library the user could either add their own or access pre-defined lessons.

Thinking about information architecture, there were different ways to organize the lessons.

We created a list of the lessons with a filtering system and a custom way for teachers to organize their lessons within folders. This way we could flag "new" lessons added, give high-level information, and the user can click in if they want more information.

Clicking into the lesson will give the lesson details which is everything the user needs to know about deciding if they want to use it and can add right to their grid directly from this screen.

We also added a search feature for the use case of knowing you want to work on Fine Motor Skills with a ball - simple search for lessons that have "Ball" in the title.

One way we wanted to validate this design was to set up a full prototype of this design and walk through it with a potential curriculum partner.

This is a video of part of the prototype we walked them through:

Next items on backlog:

• Lesson approval
• Repeating lessons
• Color-coded lessons and attaching lessons to observations