Improving Cross-Role Experiences Across a Multi-User Government Education Platform

Platform in a laptop

Next Steps Idaho is a statewide education platform designed to help students prepare for life after high school while enabling educators, counselors, and administrators to guide and monitor student progress. This case study focuses on improving cross-role experiences across a complex, multi-user government platform by reducing friction, increasing clarity, and aligning user journeys across different roles.

Next Steps Idaho supports multiple user roles, each with distinct goals and permissions:

  • Students
  • Teachers
  • Counselors
  • District Administrators
Each role interacts with shared data but experiences the platform differently. This created complexity, usability issues, and mental model mismatches across roles.

My Role:
UX/UI Designer

Responsibilities:

  • UX research and synthesis
  • Information architecture
  • User flows and journey mapping
  • Interaction design
  • UI design and design system alignment
  • Collaboration with product managers, developers, and stakeholders
  • User stories
  • QA

The Problem

As the platform scaled to support more users and features, several UX challenges emerged:

  • Inconsistent experiences across user roles

  • Confusion around shared data such as classes, bundles, assessments, and progress

  • High cognitive load during onboarding, especially for educators

  • Difficulty understanding how actions in one role impacted another role

  • Increased dependency on support and manual explanations

Because this was a government platform, any usability issue directly affected thousands of users across the state.

Goals

  • Improve clarity and consistency across roles

  • Reduce onboarding friction for educators and counselors

  • Align mental models between students and educators

  • Make system relationships easier to understand

  • Support scalability without increasing complexity

Research & Discovery

Methods

  • Stakeholder interviews

  • User interviews with students and educators

  • Review of existing user feedback and support issues

  • UX audits of current flows

  • Collaboration sessions with product and engineering

Key Insights

  • Educators did not always understand where student data originated

  • Similar concepts were labeled differently across roles

  • Some screens mixed too many responsibilities at once

  • Users relied on memory instead of system guidance

  • New users struggled most during the first session

Key UX Challenges Identified

  1. Cross-role data dependencies were invisible to users

  2. Navigation patterns were not consistent across roles

  3. Onboarding did not adapt to user context

  4. Empty states lacked guidance and next steps

  5. System feedback was often delayed or unclear

UX Strategy

1. Cross-Role Alignment

I mapped how actions taken by one role affected others and used that to:

  • Align terminology

  • Standardize component behavior

  • Clarify cause-and-effect relationships

2. Progressive Disclosure

Instead of showing everything at once:

  • Information was revealed based on user context

  • Advanced options appeared only when needed

  • Cognitive load was reduced for first-time users

3. Clear System Feedback

  • Success and error states were redesigned

  • Verification and loading states were standardized

  • Visual feedback reduced uncertainty

Design Solutions

Home Dashboard Redesign

  • Personalized welcome state

  • Clear hierarchy of primary tasks

  • Separation between active work and resources

  • Visual indicators for progress and completion

Onboarding Improvements

  • Contextual onboarding based on user role

  • Clear explanation of next steps

  • Reduced number of decisions required upfront

Empty States

  • Action-oriented empty states

  • Clear calls to action

  • Educational microcopy explaining what to do next

Navigation & Information Architecture

  • Consistent navigation logic across roles

  • Improved labeling aligned with user language

  • Clear separation between exploration and action

Accessibility & Government Standards

  • Color contrast reviewed for accessibility compliance

  • Clear focus states and readable typography

  • Consistent interaction patterns to support usability for diverse users

Results & Impact

While the platform is still evolving, early outcomes included:

  • Improved clarity across student and educator experiences

  • Reduced confusion during onboarding flows

  • Better alignment between backend logic and frontend mental models

  • More confident task completion across roles

This work laid the foundation for future scalability while keeping the experience intuitive and human-centered.

What I Learned

Designing for government platforms requires balancing flexibility and consistency

Cross-role UX is as much about education as it is about interface design

Clear system feedback reduces support needs significantly

Collaboration with engineering early prevents UX debt

Design

Student Dashboard:

Previously, the platform did not include a side navigation. Instead, it relied on a shared bookmark system that was visible to all user types. For this project, we redesigned the navigation by separating the experience by user role, ensuring that each role sees a tailored interface.

For students, the new side navigation includes Home, My Bundles, Assessments, Bookmarks, and the three exploration directories. Through user interviews, we discovered that students often felt stressed about choosing a future career and experienced pressure from both family and educators.

To address this, we shifted the interface toward a more exploratory and guided experience. The Home page was redesigned with a To-Do–driven structure, allowing students to explore at their own pace without feeling overwhelmed, while still guiding them toward the core goals of the Idaho Launch program.

Educator Dashboard:

Previously, educators were presented with the same interface as students, which made the platform confusing and failed to deliver immediate value for their daily workflows. The lack of role differentiation limited educators’ ability to quickly understand student progress and take meaningful action.

To address this, we redesigned the educator dashboard to be purpose-driven and role-specific. We introduced an impersonation feature, allowing educators to view the platform from a student’s perspective and easily review individual progress and completion status.

To support classroom onboarding, we added a student demo account, enabling educators to walk through the platform in live classroom settings without exposing real student data. Additionally, we introduced Educator Notes, a shared space where educators can document observations, add context, and collaborate by sharing insights about students across the platform.

Next Steps
1. Continue validating flows with usability testing
2. Expand analytics tracking to measure task success
3. Iterate on dashboards using behavioral data
4. Refine role-based personalization
5. Validate and monitor assumptions using heatmaps and session recordings (Hotjar).