Over in marketing, we are very excited to hear about new product feature releases! And the new admin portal is looking pretty fancy. We took some time out to speak to the Product team to find out what goes on behind the scenes to make these happen.
Let’s start at the beginning – why did the product team decide to update the admin portal?
Steph, Product Manager: This went to two of our goals - providing additional insights, which can help admins make accurate decisions and drive behaviour change in learners, and also improving app UX to help admins use the platform smoothly and easily.
Bridget, Developer: This started out as a somewhat smaller project to add one or two new screens (the Insights) to the Admin portal. The intention for those screens were to present data-driven insights in a user-friendly way, which meant we needed some pretty new designs. We all ended up liking the design so much that we couldn’t resist applying the same UX and aesthetic upgrade to all the other Admin screens!
Paul, CTO: One of our core focuses this year was trying to deliver more insights to admins so that they can make more informed decisions on their learning efforts.
What was the trickiest part of the process?
Steph: There was a lot to test!
Bridget: I’d say broadly speaking it was the scale of the changes that was the biggest challenge. When you’re trying to change many things at once, it's easy to only get mid-way through one piece of work and then start another only to forget where you got to in the first piece. We had to (try) to be very deliberate about our to-do list and our testing plan.
Paul: Trying to display the data we wanted on each page whilst keeping response times low; some of our customers have answered over 10 million questions and the insights pages rely on calculating results from these.
What did you learn along the way? And, what would you do differently next time?
Bridget: I learned that “scope creep” (where the scope of a project gets bigger and bigger over time) is very hard to avoid! I’ve also learned some valuable lessons on query performance, as some of these new admin screens deal with large amounts of data. In terms of what we would do differently next time, I would have broken the project up into smaller pieces of work.
Paul: Definitely some more advanced query optimisation techniques.
What is your favourite part of the new admin portal and why?
Steph: The new Home page is my favourite part, which admins see when they enter the admin portal – it gives an immediate snapshot of what is going on in the account and also has links to information to help admins make the best use of the platform to achieve their goals.
Bridget: I don’t think I’ll be alone in saying the new ‘Insights’ tab is the most exciting part of this release. Admins and Yarno champions are often using the Admin portal to understand how their learners are using Yarno and what that means for their learning objectives. This latest evolution is aimed at helping admins do just that, in an easily accessible way.
Paul: I love the new Insights tab, though I also enjoyed replacing the front page that admins see when they sign in to Yarno. For the longest time, this page had been under-appreciated and it’s good to see that it’s now seen some love.
So, there you have it! We are pretty proud of our Product team for working so hard on this new release. If you'd like to see what the new Admin portal looks like check out this blog post. Or, if you're an admin, just log into your Yarno account!
