For the last year, the User Experience (UX) Service has supported the LOUISA project with a programme of UX research activities aimed at understanding problems with the current experience of assessment and feedback from student and staff perspectives and identifying potential ways to improve it. Here, I consolidate the work that led to the recommendations and share some reflections. 

In 2024, the LOUISA project was initiated to examine and enhance how assessments and feedback are delivered through Learn, with the aim of reducing unnecessary inconsistencies and complexities for the benefit of both students and staff. 

LOUISA set out to address interconnected problems identified through previous user research. Students repeatedly spoke of a disjointed experience of submitting assessments and receiving feedback and reported struggling with coursework submission workflows due to processes varying significantly across their courses. Staff expressed concerns about overly complex workflows, annoyance at inconsistencies and frustrations around providing feedback that students did not read.  

Read blog posts about previous user research in Learn as part of Learn Foundations and the Learn Ultra projects:

• User research with students has helped guide the Learn Ultra implementation
• Understanding what staff and students need from Learn for hybrid teaching and learning
• A service design approach to Learn Foundations

The LOUISA UX research programme followed a user-centred design process

To support the goals of LOUISA, the User Experience (UX) research programme was designed to uncover and understand difficulties within assessment and feedback workflows, determine which issues to address as a priority, partner with the project team to devise solutions and workflows, and test these with students and staff, culminating in recommendations for improvement.  

Through a series of research activities, the programme aimed to gather detailed data about the current staff and student experiences of assessment and feedback in Learn, to understand the nuances of the problems faced, to assess their impact and to ideate on solutions. The programme was led and facilitated by the UX Service, a team which brought expertise in user-centred research activities and techniques to surface and prioritise data to be acted upon. 

Read previous blog posts documenting the stages of the LOUISA UX research programme:

• A UX strategy to improve the course assessment experience for staff and students 
• User research with students to understand the assessment submission and feedback process in Learn 
• Conducting a second round of student research to understand students’ experiences of in-course assessment in Learn 
• Working with University colleagues to prioritise student research findings for the LOUISA project 
• Usability testing highlighted ways to improve students’ assessment and feedback experience in Learn
• Staff reviews of Learn assessment and feedback workflows showed an overall alignment and an opportunity to refine guidance

The UX team collaborated with UX workstream colleagues as well as the Learn team

Although facilitated by the UX team, the success of the LOUISA UX research programme was largely dependent on the engagement of the UX workstream, a group of staff representative of different Colleges and Schools, to help provide expert contextual knowledge of assessment and feedback workflows for their courses, to propose students to hear from to accurately describe their experiences of assessment and feedback, and to recommend colleagues in their respective areas to also feed knowledge and expertise into the project. With their input, the UX team were enabled to uncover detail about problems, propose appropriate solutions and test these to culminate in recommendations. The UX team also worked closely with the Learn team, to make use of their extensive subject matter knowledge to understand root causes of problems and ideate on solutions, and to draw on relevant resources such as the good practice guidance initiated following the Learn Ultra project in 2021.

Access the Learn Good Practice Guidance SharePoint (login required)  

Recommendations emerged from student usability tests and staff reviews

Following a user-centred design process, interviews with students identified pain points in the assessment and feedback process, which were prioritised for action with the help of University staff who contributed their expertise through meetings of a UX workstream. Solutions to the prioritised problems  took the form of a prototype Learn course to be usability tested by students and the design of workflows for text-based, group and media submissions to be reviewed by staff. Results of the usability tests and the staff reviews identified five areas of recommendation, which were as follows:

1.Existing good practice guidance should be followed to ensure as consistent an experience for students as possible  

Usability tests on a Learn prototype course created using the Good Practice Guidance showed students completed five out of eight key assessment tasks (finding due dates, submitting assignments, and accessing marks/feedback). This demonstrated the guidance was effectively supporting essential assessment processes. This was further confirmed by positive staff reviews of the proposed workflows that had been designed based on the guidance.

2. Good Practice guidance should be updated in several areas to ensure staff are well-supported  to create consistent assessment experiences for students  

Workflow reviews identified various instances where staff were looking for help to carry out assessment and feedback related tasks, and for specific guidance on what to do in the event of changes. In addition, student usability tests highlighted areas where additional guidance may be useful to staff to help them prepare Learn so that it was centred towards student needs. It was therefore recommended that the Good Practice Guidance continues to be reviewed with particular attention to updating and adding guidance in the following areas, to be signposted appropriately so staff can easily find the information they need in the SharePoint: 

• Consistent approach of layouts, language and terminology for assessment information within Learn, with an emphasis on meaningful labels and titles  
• Placement and formatting of assessment information in Learn  
• Communication of assessment guidance and information to students (including information students needed to provide on their submissions)
• Setting up and labelling dropboxes   
• Placement of rubrics information
• Dealing with delegated marking changes in Learn 
• Handling similarity reports (currently found in Turnitin integration with Learn assignments) 
• Set up of media assignments and placement of guidance on submitting media assignments for students to follow  
• Preparing for and handling group assignments

3. Double blind marking functionality should be requested from Learn’s provider, Anthology

Reviews of proposed workflows with staff revealed that the current version of Learn Ultra lacked a mechanism to achieve double blind marking, which was required for marking courses over 40 credits. It is recommended that this is addressed with the vendor of Learn Ultra to request that this functionality is built in.  

4.Content Design principles should be applied to the Good Practice Guidance Sharepoint 

Given the intricate nature of many of the tasks involved in assessment and feedback workflows, and the frequent need for staff to complete these tasks within a given timeframe, guidance played a crucial role in helping and supporting staff to take the right steps to complete tasks correctly and efficiently. Intuitively labelled sections of the SharePoint could aid staff to find the necessary help to complete unfamiliar, new or updated protocols that may be difficult for them to commit to memory.

In usability testing, guidance was also shown to play a role in supporting students with unfamiliar tasks and procedures at critical points in the assessment submission process. It is therefore recommended that the content design expertise of the UX Service is drawn upon and combined with the subject matter knowledge of the Learn team towards the outcome of making the Good Practice Guidance SharePoint as useful and usable as it possibly can be.  

5. The Early Adopters Programme should be used as an opportunity to further improve assessment and feedback 

While the UX research programme succeeded in identifying and prioritising assessment and feedback problems and helping to design solutions to address these, the Early Adopters Programme offers the opportunity to test solutions in authentic course contexts with real students, taking into account operational nuances, practical constraints and ways of working that cannot be fully replicated in user experience research scenarios.

Furthermore, the Early Adopters Programme will enable broader testing of solutions across more courses and use cases, enabling testing the solutions at scale, and generating robust evidence of impact to inform adoption decisions and further improvements. The programme also offers the opportunity to build on the collaborations established between the LOUISA team and colleagues from the wider University for mutual benefit.  

Learn more about the Early Adopters Programme on the LOUISA SharePoint (requires login) 

Applying UX principles to assessment and feedback – reflections

The UX Service has previously supported several projects to improve the experience of using Learn for staff and students, however, LOUISA differed from our previous UX work with Learn since it involved focusing on a specific end-to-end Learn workflow. With this in mind, I have pulled together three reflections from this latest piece of Learn UX work.

Prioritisation was necessary at multiple stages of the UX research process

Setting priorities is an important part of any user-centred process – in order to establish the audiences and tasks at the centre of the user experience in question. The need for prioritisation arose at several stages of the LOUISA UX research programme. Reviewing outputs from a business analysis of assessment and feedback processes across 23 Schools completed between 2022 and 2023 revealed multiple assessment types, varied technologies and systems in use alongside Learn and different tasks in processes that had been built up and iterated upon in response to the specific context and circumstances. Prioritisation was necessary to ensure a focus on the most commonly used assessment types, and to concentrate on optimising technologies and processes to fit. Later in the UX research programme, when student interviews had revealed areas of the process students had experienced difficulty with, it was necessary to prioritise again to ensure a focus on the aspects in most need of improvement, to ensure these aspects were given the necessary attention.

Involving staff in analysis of student research data helped prioritisation

In previous Learn UX work as part of Learn Foundations, the top tasks survey technique helped identify which tasks in Learn mattered most to students and staff so that these could optimised. For the LOUISA UX research programme, a top tasks survey was not an appropriate prioritisation method since to achieve the purpose of assessment and feedback, all tasks in an end-to-end assessment and feedback workflow were necessary, it was not a question of some tasks being more important than others. In order to tease out the priority aspects of assessment and feedback workflows to improve, it was therefore necessary to combine staff expertise and student perspectives, to ensure the prioritisation was being led by subject-matter experts, therefore countering any bias from the UX team who were comparatively less familiar with the nuances of the processes and associated tasks. Working in this way also helped avoid the risk of adopting the wrong focus, and inadvertently changing parts of workflows that were working well. Establishing and facilitating regular meetings of the UX workstream, attended by staff representatives from different Schools and Colleges, represented a different approach to involving interested parties in the LOUISA UX work, and proved to be an effective way to prioritise areas to work on which mattered to both staff and students. Between March and May 2025, staff attending these meetings synthesised and analysed interview data from 25 students, which led to the identification of 13 areas students found problematic with assessment and feedback and subsequently, the collective decision to focus on three of these problems, to improve the student experience of:

• finding the information they need for an assessment
• knowing where to submit their assignments in Learn
• finding their marks and feedback in Learn.

Guidance and consistency are especially important when procedures are complex

A commonly cited Law of UX is Tesler’s law, or the Law of the Conservation of Complexity which states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced, and needs to be assumed by the system or the user.  When systems are as simple as they can be, users need to be supported to navigate resultant complexities, which can be achieved by good guidance and use of familiar, consistent approaches to interface design. In the case of the assessment and feedback workflows in Learn, some stages of the process seemed outwardly complex with potential for simplification, however, further investigation revealed sound reasoning behind the complexity, in order to align with existing, well-established assessment procedures and policies.

Continuing a theme from previous UX work in Learn, the results of usability testing and feedback from staff workflow reviews as part of the LOUISA UX work showed that consistent placement of items within the user interface (for example, the assignment question in the assessment criteria section, marks in the Gradebook section), familiar arrangements of assessment folders and uniform approaches to key stages of the process (for example, use of Learn rubrics) all contributed to making the student experience of assessment and feedback as intuitive as it possibly can be, and making the staff experience as straightforward as possible. It followed that adopting content design principles to write user-centred guidance was a good way to ensure that when processes are unfamiliar and unintuitive to students and staff, there is a means for them to get the help they need quickly, while remaining in control of the tasks they need to complete.