Am I introducing unnecessary friction by disabling these form fields? (Educational Technology)
*I've obfuscated some proprietary language I would normally use in my company in order to protect our IP.
Hi everyone!
I was hoping to get some advice with a problem I've been working on recently. I work in the educational technology industry and the software I work on allows teachers to create assignments to give their students electronically. For each assignment, teachers can specify the assignment type (quiz, homework, lab etc.) as well as toggle a "switch" that if on, registers the assignment as a "common assessment". This common assessment designation allows administrators in the organization to see students' assignment results across different teachers and makes it so that if the assignment is published to the library (a place where different teachers can find assignments), it is tagged in such a way that communicates to other teachers that they should also be giving that assignment to their students. Additionally, two fields are compulsory with the common assessment designation - grade and subject. The grade and subject fields are used for administrative data reporting purposes as well as to signal to other 3rd Grade Math teachers that they should be giving a 3rd Grade Math assignment to their students that they find in the library if the assignment is tagged as a common assessment.
The design challenge lies in the placement and logic of the common assessment switch mentioned above. In the past, toggling the switch on for an assignment was something that was found solely when publishing the assignment to the library. If toggled on, the assignment's results would be visible to administrators and the assignment would be filterable in the library as a common assessment. Through user research, we discovered that this process does not fit most of our users' mental model of where the common assessment designation should be and doesn't mirror the fact that our users don't always publish their assignments to the library (and might want a common assessment that isn't found in the library) As a result, the number of users that designate assignments as common assessments is much lower than expected.
Since then, we've iterated towards a design that involves asking users whether the assignment is a common assessment in a place outside of the publish to library page. While being able to designate an assignment as a common assessment only when publishing to the library caused our users some problems, it was a broken yet predictable part of their experience. My concern is that asking users whether an assignment is a common assessment outside of the publish to library flow will cause some dissonance among users that expect that designation to still be there. Additionally, it is still important for the common assessment designation and meta-data fields now found on another page to carry on when a user is publishing to the library. Hence, I've made the decision to pre-populate the publish to library page with meta-data associated with the common assessment designation (whether the assignment is a common assessment, as well as the grade and subject for the assignment). In order to make it so that users can't change the common designation in two different places, I made the decision to display the pre-populated fields in the publish to library page but deactivate the fields so that they are only editable in one place (the new page where we'll be asking if users would like to designate the assignment as a common assessment). I worry that I'm restricting our users a bit too much here and potentially adding unnecessary friction. In my mind, this could cause usability to suffer as well as lead to users abandoning publishing to the library or designating an assignment as a common assessment. I've attached some low-fidelity screenshots below to show what I mean. If a user clicks on "Edit settings" they would be taken to the page where they can "tag as a common assessment". Our project timeline is tight, but if there are ways anyone can recommend to test this with users, that would be great, as well.
Does anyone have any thoughts or advice? I really appreciate it :)
