College Board: My AP

CHALLENGE

After streamlining the AP exam registration and administration process on a new digital platform for teachers, students, coordinators and administrators, the College Board needed help envisioning and implementing the personalized “My AP” landing page experiences for the four differentiated AP constituent group needs.

managing director: jon mysel, Project lead: CHRISTIAN LINSEY,
UX & digital designers: Jen zhao, Sarah knotz

The teacher and student experiences centered around an interactive timeline that promoted the visibility of registration deadlines, assignment due dates and other milestones.

For teachers, we designed a course progress module to monitor different class sections’ progress through an AP course’s required units.

The student experience reflected a parallel module with the individual’s assignments, progress checks and due dates (optimized for mobile, most student’s preferred device for interacting with College Board).

Although similar to each other, the Administrator and Coordinator experiences required the development of unique modules, data displays and language tailored to the subtleties of their roles in the AP testing process.

The designs leveraged College Board’s existing design system (Apricot), however we also created new interaction elements that could blend seamlessly into the system.

To ensure that the new designs would integrate well with the Apricot design system, we based new modules upon existing interaction patterns and pieces wherever possible.

Process:

The project kicked off with a Requirements Workshop to better understand each user group’s lengthy and granular list of requirements. We humanized the process by framing these requirement in the context of user goals prioritized by frequency and importance. 

Next, we went through multiple rounds of concept designs, balancing consistency across audiences with the unique needs and priorities of each group.

The project also included two rounds of user testing; first after the concept design phase, and once more after the detailed design system had been applied. 

“It looks like you’ve got great people working on this because it’s good. It’s really good. I can’t wait to use it.”

— AP Calculus Teacher

The landing pages were implemented as the entry point to pages with features at a varying levels of cohesion and finesse. Although the limited scope of our consulting project meant that we couldn’t ensure a seamless end-to-end experience, our designs set a precedent for all the user groups to have a positive first experience with the new AP exam registration and administration process.