Product: Transforming Teamwork with ‘Tandem’
At the heart of modern education lies a pressing need: preparing students for a collaborative workforce. Tandem emerged as a solution tailored to enhance the way teamwork is taught and managed in higher education.
It’s designed to support and optimize the team-based learning experience across higher-ed institutions.
Objective: Conduct generative and evaluative research to provide a user-centered strategy for transforming Tandem’s user experience and service design to achieve enterprise-readiness and scale adoption beyond the early adopter phase at the University of Michigan.
Challenge: To evolve Tandem’s strategy to meet its scalability and user adoption goals, my research aimed to tackle key user experience barriers within the onboarding process while providing foundational insights on target users. Instructors looking to adopt Tandem and implement it into their courses need a lot of support directly from the product team, a key barrier to the platform’s scalability.
At the time I began this work, technical enhancements to address scalability were underway, but the user experience (UX) and service design elements essential for Tandem’s scalability had not been fully addressed.
I initiated and led the UX research that identified and targeted these critical aspects. My research was pivotal in helping the team shift from a high-touch, intensive onboarding and support system to an intuitive, self-servicing model, by clarifying how to align Tandem’s design with instructors’ needs and existing workflows.
The research shaped redesigns that improved both product utility and usability. This shift not only made Tandem more learnable for instructors but also facilitated the broader adoption required to meet the organization’s annual user growth objectives.
Our UX research identified a central strategic insight impacting both the usability of our platform and the overall learning experience: instructors do not make pedagogical choices in a vacuum; these decisions are deeply intertwined with logistical considerations.
Pedagogical choices involve determining what to teach, such as selecting specific lesson topics or teamwork exercises. Logistical choices, on the other hand, relate to when and how these lessons fit into the overall course timeline, including scheduling around exams, major projects, and holiday breaks.
Previously, our platform’s design compartmentalized these two aspects, requiring instructors to first make abstract pedagogical decisions about lesson content without visibility into the course’s logistical framework. This misalignment forced instructors to revisit and revise their decisions once the logistical constraints became apparent, leading to significant rework. Often, instructors either avoided this cumbersome rework or failed to integrate the Tandem content effectively, resulting in a learning experience that felt disjointed and overwhelming for students.
To resolve this, we redesigned the information architecture to allow for a simultaneous view of pedagogical and logistical planning. The new interface features a dynamic calendar that enables instructors to:
This strategic improvement dramatically reduced the time to value by enabling instructors to make more informed decisions quickly, reducing the need for revisions, and enhancing the overall course coherence. By aligning pedagogical content with logistical realities, instructors can now offer a more integrated and effective learning experience, leading to improved student satisfaction and better educational outcomes.