mySci Registration
Rebuilding mySci’s login and registration system: improving access, reducing support, and empowering 8,000+ teachers.
00
tl;dr
mySci, a STEM education program for K-8 teachers, needed a scalable login system that could grow with their expanding user base without sacrificing ease of use for busy, often non-technical educators. Their original shared login model created security risks, support overload, and zero visibility into who was actually using the curriculum. Over the course of three years, I led a full redesign of the teacher experience: planning, designing, prototyping, and implementing a secure, user-friendly registration and login system. We moved from shared credentials to 8,000+ verified teacher accounts across 130 districts. The result was a smoother experience for teachers, a dramatic drop in support requests, and a system built to support mySci’s long-term growth.
my role
Lead designer & developer – UX strategist, UI designer, project manager, frontend and backend developer.
01
Some Background
Who is mySci?
mySci is a science-based program of a St. Louis, MO university created for elementary/middle school teachers and their classrooms. This program provides curriculum, materials, professional development, and more for teachers in the midwest and beyond. mySci engages students in STEM learning via hands-on, inquiry-based curriculum that nurtures critical thinking and creativity. If you ask me, they're single-handedly creating countless little geniuses in hundreds of schools.
The mySci Ecosystem
Even though the mySci program is primarily built to serve one persona (hint: it’s teachers), there are still a handful of other roles that had to be considered when reworking the login and registration process.
Teachers
If you hadn’t already gathered, teachers are the primary users of the mySci program. They are typically on the website and/or in the curriculum daily. With insights gathered by mySci professional development instructors, my team and I learned that the typical mySci teacher was not necessarily tech-savvy and that their goals were to spend as little time as possible on the website. In a nutshell, they needed quick access to the material and to get back to planning their day/week & teaching their students.
Outside of our teacher persona, we had a couple of secondary roles that needed special consideration for the whole ecosystem to run smoothly.
District Admins
These folks only made up a small percentage of the mySci user base, but they played a crucial role in the current relationship between mySci and their enrolled districts. They were responsible not only for ordering and managing the delivery of materials/kits that supplement the curriculum, but also for distributing the login to every teacher in their district. A big ask, especially since this was only a small part of their job responsibilities.
mySci Admins
The administrators at the university who were responsible for the mySci program essentially served as the support team. You can imagine how many phone calls and emails they received if a login for a whole district wasn’t working. Technology and website troubleshooting was not a strong suit of these users either. They were simply asked to help teachers when they had problems even though it was not in their job description. These program admins wanted to field less support calls and wanted to feel more confident in solving the ones that did come in.
Where I come in
This client was one of our smaller ones, and for us smaller meant fewer available resources. Because of this I owned most of the project responsibilities. My “hats” consisted of UX strategist, UI designer, project manager, and developer. I managed the project & client relationship, collected information on the problem(s) from stakeholders, iterated through possible solutions, created flows, presented project progress, collected stakeholder feedback in an effective way, interpreted and prioritized this feedback, ultimately executed on the agreed upon solution, and so much more. So yeah, pretty much everything.
02
The Challenge
mySci’s start was modest. Their original site consisted only of a list of districts enrolled in the mySci program. Each of these districts had access to a list of links that navigated to a Google Drive folder containing the mySci curriculum and needed materials. In 2019 my team and I created a hierarchical page structure that exactly resembled the mySci curriculum itself. This allowed for more teacher interaction to happen on their website as opposed to poking around in a Google Drive folder. This was a step in the right direction, but there was still a lot of room for growth.
The mySci team expressed concerns around teacher/user data accuracy, account management, and the security of their proprietary curriculum. A few key problems arose:
Accounts and passwords were shared by entire districts. Apart from the technical issues this caused, it also made it impossible to track usage for individual school buildings, let alone individual teachers.
Similarly, assigning a singular account for whole districts was asking for problems. Each school year internal mySci team members were fielding 250+ support form requests (more than per day)
300+ “forgot password” & “technical support request” form submissions from June ’19 through May ’20
There was no way of knowing if a teacher belonged to a valid district enrolled in the mySci program.
Maintaining updated teacher information from year to year would be difficult and likely impossible.
While their internal team has worked vigorously to improve and add to the curriculum, they didn’t have a system in place that would allow their site and user base to easily grow with them. Instead of wrapping the metaphorical “leaky pipe” in duct tape and hoping it didn't burst, we decided to take it on while it was still manageable.
Let's dig in!
year
2021
timeframe
3 months
tools
Figma, Wordpress, React
category
product design
03
The Approach
Let’s start at the beginning
This project took place over the span of about three years in the summer of 2021. We wanted to be as lean as possible to avoid biting off more than we could chew and we also wanted to ease our teachers into the new site experience.
Starting Small
At the very beginning we knew that we could have implemented a half-dozen more features and changes than we ultimately did. Instead we lunched with an MVP to prove that enabling individual login was a good and feasible solution. We would keep a similar approach for the following releases which allowed us to avoid any wasted work. I’ll walk you through each release — the challenges we faced, the solutions we designed, the lessons we learned, and how those insights shaped our decisions for future releases.
04
2021: Enabling Individual Teacher Login
Targeting the Business Outcome. Focused on the Teacher Experience.
The desired business outcome is what fueled this whole project. The current system only allowed for one login for an entire district of teachers. This meant that one password could be shared by hundreds of teachers. Only having a singular login for each district put a ton of stress on the system. Not only were mySci admins plagued with a constant stream of support requests, but the experience of teachers and district admins also suffered. A task as simple as logging in to access the curriculum was unreliable and quickly became frustrating. mySci also had no idea who was accessing their curriculum. This was okay at first, but is something that became an obstacle to program growth and quality as time went on. While the end goal was to relieve the stress on the internal team and gain visibility of their user base, it was never to come at the expense of the teacher experience. We had to figure out how to take a step forward from both a business and UX perspective.
Defining Problems. Creating Opportunities.
As I mentioned above, teachers have been logging into the mySci website for years; they just shared it with every other single teacher and admin in their same district. We felt that placing their materials behind a unique login wouldn’t cause issues because they were already logging in. However, there were other challenges that we had to address outside of simply enabling a login.
How might we prevent account sign-ups from teachers not in a mySci-enrolled district?
How might we inform teachers of this update and create a smooth transition from shared to individual accounts?
How might we ensure that teachers have access to the correct curriculum?
These are all problems that emerged once we decided to transition from shared to individual logins. The last thing we wanted to do was take 1 step forward and 2 steps back. Creating a positive and smooth transition to the new system meant we had to figure out how to address these key problems.
Restricting Teacher Registration
A Dose of Familiarity
When brainstorming ideas on how to restrict registration to enrolled mySci teachers only, a handful of ideas emerged. Some were more sophisticated than others. Many of the teachers and admins for each of these districts already knew the code required to access the curriculum before. To streamline registration, we used this same code to allow teachers to create their own account.
Teacher Announcement
Spreading the Word
The typical login process layouts were repurposed with language that informed teachers and admins of the update and provided guidance on how to proceed. We also assisted mySci in crafting some language to put together for an e-blast for all districts currently enrolled. Every step of the way they were greeted with messaging that helped them gain access to the curriculum.
Teacher to District Connection
Right Place, Right Stuff
During the registration process teachers were required to select which district they belonged to. This served two purposes: it allowed us to confirm that their district code was correct for the district they selected and it allowed us to connect that teacher to the district so we could display the correct curriculum once they signed in.
05
2022: Securing the Curriculum
After a successful first year of individual teacher accounts we regrouped to discuss what the next iteration of mySci and teacher registration should look like. The absence of any kind of gated registration was the elephant in the room. At this point anyone on the internet could sign up for an account if someone shared the district code with them (which was about as common as shared Netflix accounts). Once they’re out there they tend to spread faster than you might think. We knew that if mySci was going to grow in both size and quality this needed to be addressed. That was the main objective, and throughout the year a few other problems popped up. Teachers were having issues activating or accessing an existing account. They complained about non-delivered emails and login form errors. Distributing the district codes to all teachers in a district was a hassle and required too much of the district admins. The data collected on mySci teachers was lacking, to say the least. We didn’t know simple things like what school building they teach in or what their
role is.
- Teachers were having issues activating or accessing an existing account. They complained about non-delivered emails and login form errors.
- Distributing the district codes to all teachers in a district was a hassle and required too much of the district admins.
- The data collected on mySci teachers was lacking, to say the least. We didn’t know simple things like what school building they teach in or what their role is.
Account Activation
Under the Hood Improvements
A little background: our registration process requires the user to retrieve an email and click an activation link before they can access their new account.
What the user can see obviously has a massive impact on their overall experience, but so does the technology that is running behind the scenes. When we learned how often signups went awry, we knew that we had to address it. Currently the whole process was managed by Wordpress, which was likely insufficient to do what we were asking it to do. We enabled email logging to allow us to see if the activation emails were even sending in the first place. They were, but it turns out that a majority of the time they were landing in spam. To fix this we switched the control over email delivery from the default Wordpress service to Sendgrid’s SMTP server. The reliability of the activation emails immediately improved and we effectively eliminated this frustrating roadblock for teachers.
Accessing the Curriculum
Just Sign Up and We’ll Do the Hard Part
The problem: Above I mentioned the contact form that acted as the catch all for any issues encountered by the teachers. One of the most common submissions was the request of their school district’s code. Obviously not a secure process, requiring a lot of trust that the submission was legitimate. Even if it were, that’s a pretty awful experience for the teacher, and they are essentially locked out until they receive a response. In addition, district admins were also fielding these requests. They receive one-off requests for weeks of teachers asking for the district code so they can simply sign up and login. Just terrible.
The solution: We brainstormed a handful of solutions and eventually took two options to the client. One involved a member management portal for each district, which was struck down mostly because it required too much work on the district side (one of the key issues we were trying to eliminate in the first place – duh). Ultimately, we landed on a solution that only allowed teachers to sign up using their district assigned email address.
The Sign-up Process: Make it Effortless
This new registration process was much more involved for everyone, teachers included. We made sure that we did everything within our power to make the registration experience as pleasant and effortless as possible.
District and School Selection
mySci was growing exponentially in the region and this meant dozens of new districts each year. Because of this we new we couldn’t just slap a dropdown pick-list and let the teacher have at it. Instead, we added a search bar with live javascript filtering. This saved each teachers from endlessly scrolling to find their district in a list of 100+.
Email Confirmation
One pain point that presented itself in the research from the past year was incorrectly typed email addresses. We decided to simply email confirmation field to mitigate this as a possibility and save the teacher the trouble.
Email Validation
While we deeply care about the experience of the teachers on the mySci platform we also have to protect our product. mySci admins collect a list of email domains (usually just one or two) or each district, we then used that list to validate all new registrations against to confirm that each signup was legitimate.
06
2024: Staying Current
The first couple years of the updated registration process was a success. We drastically reduced the amount of teacher and district support on the mySci admin side. Feedback from teachers was positive and overall we had implemented a sustainable, long-term system for user management.
One Missing Piece
After a few years of teacher registration and a couple years of returning users, we noticed some issues.
There was no way to keep teacher information updated (things like role, grade level, name changes, etc)
Additionally, and more importantly, there was no way to validate that a teacher was still teaching in an active mySci district. Meaning that a teacher with a login from a previous school year would still have full access to the curriculum
Charting the Labyrinth
Addressing these issues started off simple and straightforward enough, but after further exploration it started to look more like a labyrinth than a stroll down easy street. We knew we needed to dive in charting each of these journeys. We worked through all of the scenarios, painstakingly going through it over and over to confirm we weren’t missing any key pieces.
Naturally, this exploration was done via flow chart. This allowed us to visualize the flow, understand where things got a little hairy, and where some of the negative user experiences were likely to occur.
Life in the Show-Me State
However, as you may know, flowcharts can quickly become challenging to understand after a handful of steps. When we walked through this with the client it didn’t quite land. The flowchart was through and technically accurate, but it required a lot of mental processing to visualize how it was all going to work. We needed to show them how it was going to work and what it was going to look like.
Prototyping the Flowchart
After realizing that the flowchart wasn’t going to be enough to get buy-in from the mySci team, we shifted our attention to creating an interactive prototype of the whole experience.
Post-login Survey
When teachers logged in for the first time in the new school year they were presented with a unclosable popup survey. This allowed mySci to keep their data up-to-date and their curriculum restricted to teachers within active districts only.
Conditional Logic
Keeping the survey as brief as possible as our top priority. We wanted to get the information needed and allow teachers to quickly confirm the existing data in our system so they could move on
Data Connections
The data submitted in this survey natively updated the teacher information in the backend of the site, but mySci used HubSpot to manage much of the relations with their teachers. To reduce the amount of manual data entry and migration we also implemented a connection between our Wordpress site and mySci’s HubSpot instance. This allowed the whole system to be automated.
06
Results
Four school years ago the mySci partner had a user management, registration, and login process that was clumsy, outdated, and provided very limited visibility for the mySci team. Today they are running a much smoother operation that has improved the experience for everyone involved on both sides. They now have individual logins for each teacher, a curriculum that is restricted to those that are verified, and a system for maintaining accurate data for their entire user base.
Since launching these updates mySci has registered 8000+ teachers from 130 districts and successfully returned 6500+ teachers from a previous school year.
Support requests have dropped from the 250+ requests per school year to less than 2-3 per month.
see also
.say hello
