NSW Department of Education

School Learning Environments & Change
End-state vision | 2019

The challenge

To conceive a vision of future online experiences required for the diverse user group of school executives, teachers, students and parents serviced by the newly formed School Learning Environments and Change (SLEC) group.

To help reinforce SLEC’s position as a creative and solution based educational entity. Not only were the results of the project to be innovative and creative, but the process had to be seen by those involved from DoE as reflecting this.

What we did

Double diamond process

Boomworks’ version of the Double Diamond design process was used to create an online End State Vision – a visual articulation of a variety of scenarios and how they met the needs of the identified users. 

The main feature of the Double Diamond is its emphasis on the “divergent and convergent thinking”, where first many ideas are created, before refining and narrowing down to the best idea.

This was executed through a range of user engagement activities including: 

• A business workshop with 7 stakeholders participating from across Departmental groups including SLEC, Infrastructure, Strategic Communications and the Digital team

• 5 user workshops with 31 participants representing school executives, teachers and learning support staff across high schools and primary schools across metropolitan and regional NSW

• 5 in-depth teacher interviews with staff at a K-12 school with high focus on project-based learning (PBL) 

• A user workshop with 6 parents of students from high schools and primary schools in Sydney metro area

• 19 one-on-one interview style design review sessions with teachers and executives from metro and regional schools. 

My role

Design Lead for Boomworks:

• UX research

• Comparative analysis

• Usability testing

• Front-end visual design – created 27+ key screens to visualise online concepts

• Stakeholder presentations 

“You’re making the boring department look exciting!”

– Workshop participant

Outcomes

• Successfully delivered a vision for the future with pathways for the organisation to adopt across future projects

• Interaction with 61 participants outside of the corporate stakeholder groups

• Definition of 6 core user archetypes

• Description of key archetype job stories used to define potential entry points/ pathways, needs / jobs and relevant online resource types

• Defined 11 online concepts mapped to archetypes

• Created 27+ key screens (including interaction variants) to visualise online concepts

• Documented the design process, outputs and recommendations in a 163-page report. 

“Something like this, that lets the teacher put their own knowledge of their classroom in to it... is brilliant.”

– Teacher feedback