Class Catalyst
In-depth UX research for a K-12 social-emotional learning platform, uncovering insights to support student well-being and engagement.
ROLE
UX Researcher
TIMELINE
Jan – Apr 2025
TEAM
4 members (Amulya, Sophia, Vanshika, Zoe)
TOOLS
Interviews, Surveys, Heuristic Evaluation
Jessica teaches fifth grade. Every morning she opens Class Catalyst to check her students' emotional check-ins — but today she almost missed something important. One student had marked "not okay" three days in a row. Jessica only noticed by chance, scrolling past a dense analytics chart during lunch. The app never alerted her. The dashboard showed data, but not what mattered most. Jessica cares deeply about her students — the tools just weren't keeping up.
Our research question: where is Class Catalyst falling short of teachers' actual workflows — and what would it take to fix it?
✦ SITUATION
Evaluating a K–12 SEL platform used by thousands of teachers
Class Catalyst is a social-emotional learning platform that helps K–12 teachers run emotional check-ins, monitor student well-being, and track engagement over time. Through a course-based industry partnership, our 4-person team was paired directly with Class Catalyst as a real client — conducting a full UX research evaluation and delivering prioritized, actionable recommendations to their product team.
✦ ACTIONS — RESEARCH PROCESS
Five methods, one converging picture
Stakeholder Interviews · 4 teachers and administrators
Semi-structured interviews with teachers and administrators surfaced three recurring frustrations: missing real-time alerts for urgent student updates, no ability to customize check-in prompts, and an analytics dashboard that was hard to read under time pressure.
Survey Pilot · 5 educators
We designed and piloted a survey instrument with educators, refining question neutrality and identifying scalable deployment paths for broader data collection.
Competitive Analysis
Benchmarked against ClassDojo, Otus, and Sown to Grow. Class Catalyst led on emotional check-in depth, but lagged significantly in notification systems and LMS integration.
Heuristic Evaluation
Applied Nielsen's 10 heuristics to the live product. Key violations: notifications that didn't reflect actual urgency, unclear navigation across dashboards, and student check-in replies that couldn't be edited after sending.
Usability Testing · 4 participants, moderated via Zoom
Moderated think-aloud sessions revealed that the analytics dashboard consistently caused confusion — users couldn't determine whether class trends were improving or declining without significant effort. Navigation to individual student data was also a recurring breakdown point.
✦ ACTIONS — KEY INSIGHTS
What teachers actually need
Real-time alerts are non-negotiable
Teachers check the platform between classes, not continuously. When a student flags distress, delayed notifications mean missed intervention windows.
Customization builds buy-in
Teachers felt disconnected from generic prompts. Writing their own check-in questions was the most-requested feature — and the highest-impact for adoption.
Analytics need to answer "so what?"
Charts existed but didn't surface meaning. Teachers need to know at a glance whether engagement is trending up or down — not decode raw data.
Navigation doesn't match mental models
Teachers think: Class → Student → This week. The current IA forced multiple detours to reach individual student data during active class periods.
✦ RESULTS — RECOMMENDATIONS
What we delivered to the product team
Redesign analytics with trend-first layout
Surface "improving / declining / stable" signals at a glance, with drill-down detail available on demand rather than as the default view.
Customizable check-in prompts
Allow teachers to create, save, and reuse their own emotional check-in questions alongside platform defaults.
Tiered notification system
Differentiate urgent alerts (student flagged distress) from routine weekly summaries, with push notifications for the former.
Restructure navigation with breadcrumbs
Align IA with teacher workflow: Class → Student → Time period. Persistent breadcrumbs reduce disorientation across dashboards.
✦ RESULTS — IMPACT
Formal research handoff to Class Catalyst
Findings were compiled into a research report and presented directly to Class Catalyst's product team, with recommendations prioritized by severity and implementation effort — giving them a clear roadmap, not a wish list.
5
Research methods
12
Participants across all methods
4
Prioritized recommendations delivered
✦ REFLECTION
What this project taught me
This project reinforced that research value comes from the handoff — findings that don't reach the right people in a usable format don't change anything. Synthesizing across five methods also taught me when to trust qualitative signals over quantitative ones, and how to frame trade-offs for a product team rather than just listing problems.