It’s back to school season and for many people it’s a time to start anew. Students all over the world are starting a new chapter of their lives. They’re setting up their dorm rooms, sporting fresh clothes, and some are even moving out of their childhood homes for the first time.
For Blackboard Mobile Learn, back to school season is no different.
Today we’d like to introduce Mobile Learn 4.0, a complete redesign of our app, available now on iOS and Android. For Mobile Learn 4.0 we went back to the drawing board, looking at feedback from students, teachers, and instructional designers. In addition, we incorporated evolving design paradigms and our app analytics to design an experience that makes using the app even more intuitive, simple, and fun.
“First and foremost the Mobile Learn experience is about reading, so the new user interface is much cleaner and simpler," says the lead designer on Mobile Learn 4.0, Tyler Hansen. "The cork board and general skeuomorphism of the previous design didn’t make reading easier, in fact in some cases it made it more difficult. After all, mobile is designed and mainly used for content consumption.”
Not to say we didn’t like the old design, it’s just time for Mobile Learn to grow up a bit. “It can now be taken a little more seriously than before, though it hasn’t lost all of its fun.” Tyler notes that the team has engineered lots of cool animations and transitions that are rooted in fun user experience rather than mimicking analog metaphors (sticky notes and chalkboards) to lighten the app experience.
Mobile Learn 4.0 offers a more personal experience for our users. You can now rename your courses (who calls their course ECON-104-SEC-45 anyways?), reorder them, hide ones you never use on your phone (maybe courses from last year), and even associate a color label to a course so that every piece of new content in the app will correspond to its specific course.
Updating an app with as many users as ours was not an easy task and we went through countless design revisions. We explored different navigation paradigms, varying color schemes, and lots of user interfaces.
***original mockups***
***original mockups***
After months of work we’re incredibly proud of the app we’ve put in the hands of our users. After a day in the wild we’re seeing some awesome feedback on Twitter, in the App Store, and Google Play.
It’s no casual affair to reimagine a product you work on every day and it’s incredibly stressful to await the response of your users. It takes a lot more people than you might think to make an app like this a reality– you have device engineers working on the iOS and Android code, backend engineers who tie it all into the school’s Blackboard Learn system, an incredible QA team to make sure there are no issues or bugs, an End User support team who work with users to help troubleshoot issues and collect their feedback, a design team who focuses on user interface and user experience, a marketing team to spread the word about the app, and of course a product management team. All these people worked together over the last year to make this app a reality and help millions of students in their pursuit of an education.
It’s always mind blowing to realize how many people rely on the technology we build– in only it’s first day live, we saw 1.1 million sessions in Mobile Learn 4.0. It’s magical to see the immediate response from students, teachers, and institutions and we're excited to incorporate the resulting feedback into the upcoming versions of our apps. Thanks again, have a great school year, and enjoy the new Mobile Learn!
