Creating an Education Engagement Platform at Ambi

Problem

We realized there was no modern online experience designed for Students

Since 2017 I have been working at Ambi as their Product Designer to craft engaging student experiences for online learning. At Ambi, we realized from personal experiences, as well as multitudes of student insights that the online student experience at most universities was drastically behind modern online standards.

Learning Management Systems (LMS's) such as Blackboard or Canvas's standards were established decades ago and while making strides to modernize, they are still crafted to cater to instructor or administrator experiences.

There was no widely used modern experience crafted for students.

In order to create this experience, my job was to help craft this experience into something user friendly, accessible, and up to modern standards of web and mobile interaction. This is a basic overview of the design of the platform as a whole.

Insights

Since I joined, our customer success research team had interviewed a large variety of students, instructors, and administrators on the pitfalls of existing online tools and their pain points in their day to day lives. Through these, several key insights were found.

#1 Students don't engage with University Tools

Existing online tools used by universities to deliver information to students are almost always also not social tools. While social features such as discussions and comments do exist, unless specified by an instructor most students would not choose to use such tools for social engagement purposes as they were not designed with such a thing in mind.

Said features are also often tied as a secondary to a primary feature or meant solely for student-instructor interaction. Surprisingly, the most widely used tool by universities to reach students often defaulted to simply email which has its own issues.

3 Minutes

The average session length on an LMS that a student spends

70%

Of emails sent are left unread

#2 Students are dispersed throughout other social platforms

With the lack of a central tool used by schools to promote social engagement, existing social media platforms are being used by students to connect, collaborate, and engage with a student population. This created a large network of disconnected experiences that students would have to discover themselves to interact online with the institution user body. This meant often times students who did not independently discover or get informed of these vectors would simply not engage with the university online at all, lacking a sense of belonging with the institution.

#3 Instructors & Administrators also suffer from this issue

Institutional members such as instructors and administrators also lacked visibility and access to their students from these above issues as well, making it tedious to communicate and remediate with students online.

Design

Architecture for a New Platform

Prior to my involvement with Ambi, the information architecture alongside desired feature-set were set and established via collaboration with design firm MetaLab. Further refinement was done later during my time at Ambi in collaboration with the firm SGTM to help establish the core architecture and philosophy of Ambi.

Most notably, was the decision to move Ambi away from its original vision of single silos run by individual institutions into a centralized network with walled 'Communities' which serve as keys for Users. So long as a User is a member of a Community, they can access exclusives Groups and Spaces within that Community. This allows Users of Ambi truly own their account, and easily navigate to and from institutions.

An image defining siloed vs community approach at Ambi

The initial feature-set was brainstormed through workshops and multitudes of back-and-forth client and user engagements, then implemented and rolled out to our initial clients.

Paring Down Features

These initial plans and implementations at Ambi were focused primarily on giving tools to turn Ambi into a combined user experience. This included a broad set of features including profile feeds, file storage, chats, calendars, etc. We had implemented these broad assumptions early on regarding the feature set Ambi should have.

Screenshot showing older layout for Ambi

Over time and as feedback started rolling in from more users, it became obvious resources could not maintain this wide breadth of tools as well as some features simply not being used either from lack of required depth or a miscalculation on the inherent value of the feature early on.

The decision was made, then, to retire some features and bring the platform down to a core set to build upon.

An Image showing Retired Features on Ambi

We decided on a different approach from our usual research subjects of students or instructors and interviewed Student Leadership themselves to discover their biggest pain points in engagement and information dissemination as it was discovered that they often are the faces and troubleshooters of many institution's online engagement sectors.

"Our fraternity has two Facebook Groups, one official and one sorta run on the side that sometimes plans non-sanctioned events and such. This is a problem since the school kind of treats both as under us, so we have to monitor god knows how many channels in case someone does something stupid."

"It's pretty hard getting information out to everyone since there isn't really one place for it. Kinda just have to tell as many of them as we can on campus or on the Facebook Group and usually it spreads from there."

It became pretty clear that Groups, or Spaces were a large desire for these Leaders to both disseminate information, socialize online, and to maintain official oversight. Going forward, this would be the new structure for Ambi.

A New Iteration

The latest step then was to restructure the platform. Making use of the existing style guide provided by earlier collaborations with MetaLab as a base and updating it, it was time to design the updated Group-Centric base for Ambi

Screenshot showing new Web Layout for Ambi

Next Steps

Continue the Evolution

Ambi is a much evolved application since its inception, and will continue to evolve through iteration, research, and change. Introducing (or, perhaps, reintroducing) new features to be a natural extension of its core feature-set as a virtual space will be vital as online interactions evolve into the future.

Among the first improvements I would like to make would be crafting an architecture and template for third-party integrations into ambi to truly bring the online student experience to modern standards.

If you'd like to hear more about Ambi, please feel free to reach out and lets chat!