NWEA’s State Onboarding Experience
The Opportunity:
NWEA, formerly known as the Northwest Evaluation Association, is a research-based not-for-profit organization that creates academic assessments for students pre-K-12. NWEA assessments are used by over 9,500 schools and districts in 145 countries.
NWEA decided to tap into the state market by offering state specific assessments. We needed to design a new onboarding experience for states instead of districts to onboard and implement the assessment.
Our Team:
My Role - Service Designer and Researcher
Vinu Casper - Product Designer
Tommy Day and Megan Wood - Product Owners
The Final Blueprint
For this phase, it was important for us work with a large range of people from our cross-functional teams.
The more details we could gain about our current experience, the better. This work provided an opportunity for us to come together and discuss our real strengths and weaknesses as a state partner.
Our goal was to collaborate and prioritize where our focus should be in improving the state delivery experience.
Discovery Workshop Objectives:
Discuss where we want to focus within our market
Describe our partner’s journey today, their pain points, and areas of opportunity
Define the key moments of those journeys and their emotional + functional needs
Prioritize area of focus for the rest of this project
Through our discovery work, we decided to focus on the onboarding experience for a Statewide Director of Teaching and Learning.
When we approached our partners, we were able to leverage tools from our discovery work to frame the research activities. Our goals were to test our assumptions and understand how we could be better partners during onboarding.
Research Objectives:
Four 1-hour sessions with Nebraska schools
Stakeholder mapping
Capturing priorities + journey validation
Goals and expected support
Research Findings:
Biggest Opportunities:
Ensure assessment results help teachers make decisions
Allow for change and flexibility during implementation of plans
Align our assessment content to curriculums
Increase collaboration between our teams and state content teams
Make it easier to create communications and training plan
For this phase of the project, we narrowed our team down to two groups of 6. Combining our broader group’s previously established insights with our newly acquired research insights, we were ready to start solutioning.
We began this process by prioritizing our research opportunities and ideating around our partner’s needs. Our goal was to keep our partners at the center of our solutions.
Ideation Objectives:
Define our experience principles
Review and prioritize our research opportunities
Ideate on how we could act on those opportunities
Storyboard ideal state experience
After ideating on our selected opportunities, the teams were ready to start building concepts. We did this by mapping our ideas back to the partner journey, and then deciding what ideas were best for each moment in the journey.
Our goal was to transform our key moments as they are today to more ideal experiences.
Designing the Ideal Experience:
Map ideas to the partner journey
Define our value proposition
Define back-stage components to support that experience
Create storyboards
Blueprint the experience
Key Service Features – Scenario A
RFP Process - One proposal that captures the state vision
Kickoff Meeting - Provide a tool that captures salient points for their ideal onboarding
Defining the Process- Provide clear role descriptions for all key stakeholders
PL offerings
Collaboration in creating the communication strategy
Creating new PL trainings based on state needs
Creating and communicating content
Key Service Features – Scenario B
RFP Process - Provide different proposal costs and tiers of service
Kickoff Meeting - Develop a tool with states to create their onboarding process
Defining the Plan - Co-create content self-paced trainings with state stakeholders
The “Assessment Literacy Portal”
Ability to collaborate on content
Upload and store content/trainings
Easily communicate portal to teachers, students, and parents
Track progress of trainings being completed
The Final Blueprint and Ideal Experience:
