The opportunity
The Ministry of Education approached Catalyst IT to design and build PaCT (Progress and Consistency Tool). This was an online web application designed to support teachers in making judgments about students’ progress and achievement in relation to the New Zealand Curriculum National Standards.
This was a very politically charged project as the National Standards were at the time not a particularly popular addition amongst teachers. It was also occurring during the time that the Novopay system was failing which created further distrust amongst teachers towards anything related to the Ministry of Education. Thus there was a great deal of delicacy required in our liaison and meetings with teachers, teaching representatives and ministry officials.
My role
As a UX designer at Catalyst IT, myself and a colleague were tasked with the research, UX design, stakeholder liaison and implementation support for the project.
Step one - research
The first stage of this project involved Interviews with the major stakeholders, Ministry officials, pedagogy experts and teacher representatives.
We also spent a large amount of time travelling the country visiting schools and running user feedback and user testing sessions with teachers.
Step two - reporting back, initial concepts and implementation
After our initial stakeholder and user interviews sessions we then started creation of some initial wireframe prototypes. We then took those wireframes back to stakeholders and teacher representatives and ran some further sessions which enabled us to go through several iterations of the wireframes. Once we all agreed that they were ready for implementation, we worked closely with the rest of the Catalyst design and development team to assist in the initial delivery.
Through the delivery of this project we provided regular presentations of progress to Ministry officials, pedagogy experts and teacher representatives. It was an important part of this project that feedback from all of these groups was regularly fed back into the product development.
The resulting product was widely applauded by stakeholders and teachers alike. Pact is still being used by teachers in schools every day.
