Canvas

Objective

I was lead mobile designer for Instructure (parent company of Canvas) for 6 years. My objective was to help increase usability and delightful experiences throughout the Teacher, Student, and Parent apps for both iOS and Android. I worked closely with the product manager and engineering teams with great success.One of the largest features I had the pleasure of designing was the Speedgrader (view the case study here).

With the success of the apps, the organization asked our team to help design and build a minimal version of Canvas that focused on the basics.

The larger platform didn’t appeal to smaller schools or new customers because of the complexity.

Requirements

Simple Canvas needed to focus on the most-used and most important jobs of the instructor and students. For the instructor’s role, they needed to create and edit assignments, chat with students, grade assignments, and track multiple courses they teach. Students needed ways to submit multiple different assignment types, view instructions and calendar events, view their submissions and grades, and chat with their instructor.

Exploration

We explored multiple layouts and styles, but made sure we had a lot of white space so 1) the user’s focus was on the content and 2) there was a lot less cognitive overhead, making the app feel condensed and stressful. We also focused on guiding the user’s through each job, whether it was creating an assignment for an instructor or submitting an assignment for a student.

Solution

In one particular experience, we hid different panels of interaction away from the main task of grading until they were necessary. For example, the grading rubric was in a tray off to the side until the instructor wanted to focus on adding that information. When the instructor needed to write comments or send messages to the student, we hid that tray until they clicked the chat icon. This allowed for focus on the main job while still keeping functionality at arm’s length.

Summary