organizing information

Information architecture and content hierarchy may be my favorite part of the job (it must be the Virgo in me). I love the puzzle of organizing information to make content easy to find, easy to understand, and delivered in a useful way. Getting this part right is so critical because it shapes the user’s experience.

At NaliniKIDS, an organization that created curriculum for teachers, we always had a lot of information to share. Below, I share two examples of how I organized curricula.

One. “The Portal“

BACKGROUND

“The portal” was our digital hub for all NaliniKIDS curriculum and teacher resources. It consisted of 400+ lessons and 120+ pieces of lesson-specific content — a lot.

We needed to give a teacher access to all the content in a way that made sense to them and was easy to navigate to what they needed. Much of the curriculum and associated resources naturally fell into categories of organization because they belonged to specific books which were the backbone of the curriculum. This was a helpful start but was only a small piece of everything we needed to organize.

THE IDEA

Generally, teachers would teach from 10 books per school year and access various teacher resources throughout the year. We needed to present the content to teacher in way that felt self-explanatory and wouldn’t require additional training.

The key to me solving this puzzle was to put myself in the teacher’s shoes and think about what information I would need and when I would need it. I thought about what a teacher would need at different points in the school year, as well as different points in the unit.

WHAT I DID

• Interviewed curriculum/instruction lead and founder to understand their vision for how a teacher would move through the curriculum. It was important to think about this from a macro perspective and micro perspective.
  
  
• Devised a solution that grouped macro-level content together and indicated to user the sequence of use.
  
  
• Developed a numeric system to indicate to user how to use the resources and curriculum to prepare to teach.
  
  
• Conducted usability testing with teachers.
  
  
• Presented ideas to stakeholders.
  
  
• Collaborated with UX/UI designer and developer to bring it all to life.

Below are screens from the website. View Invision portal prototype here.

Two. Lesson Plan

BACKGROUND

For a different NaliniKIDS program, we needed to design a layout for a lesson plan. The program had 30+ lessons that teachers could do in any order. Each lesson had the same structure, but unique content.

Because teachers could choose any lesson at any time, it was important to include the structure of each lesson on each lesson plan. Each lesson plan contained important information that prepares the teacher to teach the lesson, instructions for the lesson, and lesson content.

THE IDEA

The layout for each lesson plan would be the same. On one side, was information the teacher needed. It would be comprised of evergreen instructions for the teacher that applied to each lesson, along with guidance for that specific lesson. On the reverse side would continue with content specific to that lesson, which could be shared directly with the student.

WHAT I DID

• Interviewed SMEs (subject matter experts) to understand the vision they had for how a teacher would use the lesson plan to teach a class.
  
• Reviewed lesson plan content from 10+ lessons to detect patterns. Identified which content was ‘evergreen’ and which content was new, lesson to lesson.
  
• Developed a template for layout and shared with stakeholders.
  
• Revised and iterated off of feedback till we landed on a template that conveyed the information in the right order, felt straightforward with no additional explanation needed, and was easy to skim.