Our client, a virtual educational institution, sought to enhance student support by implementing an AI-driven solution capable of identifying at-risk students and recommending appropriate intervention methods. The challenge was to develop a system that not only accurately identified students in need of support but also recommended personalized outreach methods, such as email, phone calls, or text messages, along with conversation scripts or talking points in a short 6 week timespan.

As the Senior UX Strategy Designer, my responsibilities included:

• scoping the minimum viable product (MVP) for this use case

• leading the end to end design process

• collaborating with tech engineers, data scientists, sales and business counterparts within IBM and the client team, and 

• laying out a roadmap for scaling the solution to production.

To address the challenge, I facilitated design thinking sessions to gain insights into the current state of student support, identify and prioritize key pain points and map out success criteria for the MVP. 

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Key takeaways: Our MVP must cater to two user groups:

1. Faculty - end users performing the outreach actions

2. Data scientists - backend users building, deploying, and maintaining the outreach tool and dashboard

Working closely with executives, data scientists, tech engineers, and business stakeholders, I formulated a comprehensive user experience driven plan of action to leverage AI and machine learning for outreach. Agile methodology and iterative design sprints were employed to refine the MVP, ensuring alignment with client objectives and end user needs.

With a clear plan in place, I led the front end design process, focusing on creating an intuitive interface that empowered faculty to identify at-risk students and recommend personalized intervention methods. Through daily standups, I confirmed design direction and performed iterative user testing of medium to high fidelity prototypes. 

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Key takeaways: 

1. MVP would be built using IBM’s Carbon Design System. 

2. WCAG compliance was a top priority 

3. Interface needed to offer a logical approach to tackling prioritized student alerts while maintaining a data log of past actions taken by faculty. 

4. Faculty journey involved 3 key interactions with alerts - accept the provided action plan to address students, edit the action plan or reject the action plan altogether.

Collaboration with AI engineers and technology engineers was crucial to ensure the AI model accurately identified at-risk students and provided actionable outreach recommendations while the user interface dashboard seamlessly integrated with the model to facilitate interaction with the action plans. 

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Additionally, a generative AI component was integrated into the user interface to provide conversation scripts or talking points for certain action recommendations, enhancing the effectiveness of the outreach process. 

Through iterative design sprints, we fine-tuned the interface and functionality to deliver an MVP that showcased the transformative potential of AI in student support.

The successful delivery of the proof of concept demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of leveraging AI for student outreach in virtual education. By accurately identifying at-risk students and recommending personalized outreach methods, the solution provided valuable insights to support student success. Furthermore, the integration of a generative AI component added sophistication to the outreach process, enabling more effective communication with students. This gave IBM a competitive advantage against other AI service providers in the market. 

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Client feedback indicated we thoroughly satisfied the success criteria, proved value, and paved the way for a much anticipated business partnership.

As a Senior Designer, I was instrumental in driving the success of this MVP connecting cutting edge technology to a complex challenge. By leading the design process, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and delivering tangible results in under 6 weeks, I helped lay the groundwork for scalable implementation, and a fruitful business partnership between IBM and the client. This case study underscores the transformative potential of AI in virtual education and emphasizes the importance of user-centric design in driving innovation and improving student outcomes.