Fixing Navigation in SplashLearn's Teacher Product
At a glance
What: rebuilt the teacher product's information architecture to fix navigation ambiguity, make navigation scalable, and lift assignment rate - the lever behind teacher activation
How: IA derived from primary research (teacher calls, usability tests, stakeholder and classroom mapping), validated with card sorting, shipped in phases with an A/B-tested rollout
My role: led the project as lead designer/ product owner - initiated it, ran the research and drove stakeholder alignment to making it live.
• Honest headline: feature discovery and assignment metrics up; activation funnel and NPS.
From the user interviews
“In the very beginning it was so complicated. Once you use it, things make sense over time.”
Teacher, user interview
01 / UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
Teachers got lost before they got value
• The product had grown. Teachers arriving for the first time faced a dense dashboard and a long sidebar.
• Reports lived in many places. The same progress reports could be reached from several entry points, so teachers couldn’t build a reliable path.
• Mixed hierarchy: header combined class-level and teacher-level actions; similar actions split across header and left nav
• Not scalable: left nav repeated identical tabs under Math and English - no room for new subjects or non-class jobs (teacher engagement, competitions)
• Crowded dashboard: fixed 1280px layout, content squeezed further by worksheet filters
• Heard in NPS: verbatims flagged navigation and discovery of core actions (March NPS: 63)
• How it surfaced: I spotted it through regular NPS reviews and teacher research calls - navigation complexity kept growing as features and use cases accumulated, while observing month on month NPS drop from 72 to 63.
Primary research: the IA came from how schools actually work
“In the beginning it was so complicated…”
01 / Listen
3–4 teacher calls each week, alongside regular NPS reviews. One teacher gave up her walkthrough and asked others to explore alone.
Review ?
Review ?
4 of 7
teachers struggled to find reports
02 / Observe
Teachers struggled to find progress reports. Two meanings of “Review” caused confusion; funnel data helped trace report discovery.
School
Homeroom
Subject
03 / Map real roles
Mapped school leadership and staff, homeroom and subject teachers, plus personal spaces for profiles, help and training.
Teach
Assign
Progress
Reports
04 / Shape the IA
Grouped navigation around real teacher jobs: dashboard, curriculum, teaching, assignments, progress, reports and class settings. Subject-specific areas stay separate.
Card sorting showed how teachers group the product
What teachers want
Understand the SplashLearn proposition, also from the student’s view
Connect with students and parents
Connect with fellow teachers
Top-level groups
SpringBoard
My Classes: dashboard, subjects, student experience, assign, reports, class and student settings
My Space: profile, community, refer, help, school info, manage classes
Resources: worksheets
School context
Mapped the school hierarchy (staff, teachers, classrooms, LMCS centre, interschool competitions). Teacher space and class-level work are separate things; subject parts split into teach, assign, progress, before/after school.
Competitors reach a class dashboard in 3 to 6 steps. We took about 13.
8 products reviewed · Flow length · Action discovery · Navigation structure
Competitors / 3–6 steps
Duolingo and Class Dojo land teachers in the class dashboard, with class actions kept in context.
Our product / about 13 steps
Both reaching the dashboard and finding the right action were rated difficult. Class and teacher items were mixed across the header and left navigation.
The opportunity: fewer steps, clearer context, one action at a time.
01
Start in the class
Your class
Teach
Reports
Start where teachers work, not in a mixed teacher-and-class menu.
02
Keep class jobs together
Class
Teach · Assign
Progress · Reports
Keep teaching, assignments and reports within the same class context.
03
Reveal one action at a time
1 / Choose class
2 / Choose action
3 / Continue
Reveal the next relevant action instead of showing every option at once.
We explored three structures
Each answers the same question differently: where does a teacher start, and where do class-level and teacher-level things live?
The chosen IA: one switch for what you teach, one place for reports
The shipped structure keeps a left nav but splits the two products and gives first-timers a starting point.
Rolling out to existing teachers
• Sequencing: new-user IA shipped first (2024); existing teachers - who reported the most navigation pain - got a dedicated rollout (late 2024)
• Transition design: intro popup, walkthrough, and a safety net - switch back to classic anytime that school year; everyone moves in SY 2025-26
• Targets set: book library viewing 21% to 30%; teachers assigning 47% to 55%; NPS 63 to 69
Results - the honest version
Discovery up sharply across all pages by +50% to +200%
• Assignments up: #Assignment assigned +8% in variant; assignments at the AC2 funnel step +20-21%; assignments per student +15.1% (new teachers)
• Retention bright spots: W1 classroom retention +16%
• What it means: assignment and activation gains are real. Better feature discovery was my hypothesis for retention.
My role
• Led the project as lead designer: initiated it after spotting the navigation problem in NPS reviews, ran research calls 3-4 times a week, investigated qualitative and funnel data (including report discovery), and drove stakeholder alignment and process
• Owned the design core: research synthesis, report inventory, card sorting, modular framing and the new structure with 2 other desig co-designed the reports grouping and wireframes.
