PowerSchool SIS IA

The Project

Over the 14 years I worked at PowerSchool I made several proposals to re-architect the PowerSchool Student Information System (SIS) but there was never an appetite to take on such a massive project. The last year I worked at PowerSchool I was presented an opportunity to redesign and re-architect how the system navigation and major portions of the application worked.

Company

PowerSchool Inc.

Role & Duration

Principle UX Designer – Summer 2021

My role was to redesign the navigation, information architecture, and several critical workflows within the application. System analysis, User flows and stories, Sketching, Flow Diagrams, Stakeholder presentations, Wireframing, Visual Design, Prototyping, Front-end Architecture

The Challenge

The PowerSchool SIS workflows are very linear and have not been updated since their inception 20+ years ago. The system has become a collection of bolted-on functions without a cohesive UX architecture. Utilizing the PowerSchool Design System, I radically redesigned the information architecture, workflows, and specific highly utilized pages. This new design dramatically improved the usability of the system. View the full-size content map research.

• Provide a means for the user to locate moved functionality
• Modernize the UI
• Improve the usability of the system
  • Reduce the time on task for all users
  • Reduce training time for onboarding new users

Constraints

• Maintain end-user customization capabilities
• Avoid rewriting the whole application
• Get rid of frames in the system (yes you read that right…)
• Improve security UI due to easier access to pages

Our Users

The PowerSchool SIS has three main interfaces: Admin, Teacher, and Public. This work was focused on the Admin side of the system.

• Systems Administrators – Manage users, access to features, server settings, and system management
• Attendance Clerks – Run daily attendance, and manage all attendance data and reports
• School Administrators – Review student information, and run reports
• School Staff – Various functions: health data, reports, fees, classroom data, grades
• State Reporting – Run reports to file with the state for funding to operate the school

Security Through Obscurity

The last piece to this puzzle was providing a new means to secure the content in the system. In order to set the access for pages, admins must visit each page and set the permissions. This would require a user to visit thousands of pages one at a time, and then set the appropriate security. If the user groups changed, they would need to do it all over again. There were some utilities to do this, but it was not easy, and because of this, many admins relied on the navigation structure to secure the site. Lock the link page, and users can’t click through to the page. However, if they had bookmarked it, or looked it up on the internet, they could bypass the link page and navigate directly to the page.

Non-Linear IA

The PowerSchool SIS consisted of a series of nested link-list pages, at the end of multiple page loads users could access pages to perform functions. There wasn’t an easy or quick way to drill down to real pages without navigating multiple pages.

Organized by Tech-Stack

Another horrible outcome from years of additions to the system was organizing content by technology. As an example, reports were divided up by how the reports were coded, literally different technology stacks. So System reports written in the proprietary code base were on one page, state reports on another, and the ReportWorks reports on a third. All of these reports covered similar subjects, so a user had to memorize what tech the report was in in order to find it and run it.

Solutions

Design System-less

PowerSchool had adopted an angular-based design system. The downside with the system they built was that none of the existing software on the portfolio used angular, so everything had to be rewritten from the ground up. For the SIS which consisted of millions of lines of code and some 6,000 pages of HTML, a full rewrite was out of the question. A project of this scale would require a high labor cost, be very risky, and impact too many projects.

My solution was to update the CSS to match the design system but maintain the standards-based HTML that I had introduced years before. I was able to produce a working front end that appeared to be using the design system.

Security

My solution to the security issue was turning the system into a CMS of sorts. A few years prior we had registered all the pages in the system to the database to allow users to customize the system, and when updates came out we knew what pages were customized because they were flagged in the database. My idea was to use this catalog as a repository for the security. If the page permissions were tied to the page record we could create a single page UI to set and manage the security for the pages in the database.

Executive Presentation

I pitched the concept to our product group and they loved it. I also produced some clickable mockups to use for cognitive walkthroughs with a number of our customers. The response was fantastic. The vast majority of our users liked the approach and were eager for the changes.

Prototype

This is a clickable prototype I developed in Figma. It’s a fairly complex system but the reduction in complexity is amazing. There are two flows:

• Main Navigation – Demonstrates the main navigation, reports organization, and the import-export process
• Page Permissions – Demonstrates the single page interface for securing page access
• Video walkthrough – You can play the video to the left, or below

The Results

Success Metrics

The true measure of success for this project was conducting cognitive walkthroughs with existing long-term users. Many of these users had been using the system for a decade and were regular contributors to the customization community for our product. There was an overwhelmingly positive response to my design. Not only did it provide a huge reduction in page loads, simplification of the navigation, increased security, decreased the time to manage security, and reduced confusion on most of the major workflows.

Reflections

In my last year with the company, they accepted my proposal, although it doesn’t seem that they have implemented any of these changes since I left two years ago.