ReadyTech
Designing student and employer portals to manage apprenticeships and traineeships at TAFEs.
At ReadyTech, I was responsible for designing portals for apprentices and trainees at a variety of TAFEs. This project aimed to improve the experiences of trainers, students, employers and admin staff through a modern, intuitive and reliable student management system.
What problem are we solving?
The current portals or access students, trainers and employers have is unreliable and unhelpful. The majority of users don’t use them which makes processes paper-based or email-based.
What does success look like?
ABC
Discovery & Research
My involvement
I was responsible for the apprenticeships and traineeships stream of work at ReadyTech. I worked within a squad, collaborating closely with a product manager, lead engineer, and wider engineering team. I lead the project from discovery, to prototyping and testing, to dev hand-off and guidance.
Sketching & wireframing
Testing, VDF, Presentations
High Fidelity & Endorsement
Dev HandOff & Delivery
Discovery & Research
From the Statement of Work, I began mapping out a design timeline from discovery through to endorsement. I used the Product Refinery research matrix to help me gauge timeframes for different features.
I prepared a discussion guide with my product manager and led stakeholder and user interviews to uncover insights around the different features in the statement of work. We spoke with admin staff, business analysts, students, employers, and TAFE staff.
I also completed a competitor scan for the employer portal through assessing and documenting an existing portal that served some similar functionality but is being shelved.
Example insights for employer portal:
Tool: Dovetail
No single type of employer
Some employer user types have upward of 100 apprentices (Group Training Organisations) and others have just 1 apprentice (family-owned business).
Huge value in seeing progress
Most employers struggle to know how the student is tracking with their studies. Seeing an overview of their progress (how much completed, how much left) would be greatly valued.
Unit sign off varies by employer
Some employers sign off all in one sweep at the end of the qualification, others in a rolling manner. Not all employers need to sign off on their student’s units.
Some employers pay for invoices
Students may have their course fees paid for by employers, but not all of them. Some students will pay and seek reimbursement, others students pay everything themselves.
More interested in absent
Employers said they are more / only interested in seeing absences of their student. This includes partial absences. The reason for this is that is affects the student’s pay by the employer.
Notifications are important
Employers would like to be notified of key actions such as a student being marked as absent.
Sketching & Wireframes
I began to iterate design solutions through quick sketches. This helped me translate my learnings into design solutions. I presented early thinking to my product manager and lead engineer to test viability and feasibility.
I moved onto wireframes, addressing features and flows based on my design timeline. I presented these to my squad to again test viability and feasibility, and iterated based on feedback and learnings.
Some ideas were beyond scope and had to be simplified or backlogged.
Original idea
Update due to technical limitations