World-wide Institute & Seminary Education, commonly referred to as WISE, is the youth and adult education administration platform of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
An example of a teacher's home screen
As a platform designed to mirror and support the global education infrastructure of the church, these are just a few of the features it provides
• Global organization of all institutions, faculty, and structures
• Organization and tracking of all educational programs
• Student, teacher, and administrative record keeping
• Term-wide course-planning tools
• Full student transcripts for a global quantity of students
• Custom admin tools and support staff for issue management
WISE is easily the most complex project I've worked on. This platform manages over 400,000 seminary students, 350,000 institute students, and 48,000 teachers. During my time with the WISE team, I was tasked to expand and refine their processes. This also included a visual overhaul to ensure stylistic synchronicity with the church’s other software. This effort was called WISE 2.0.
Let's talk about one of its most important functions: managing students in a class.
.-
stUDENTS, WHy did it have to be Students?
Choosing which designs to add to your portfolio is like choosing between your kids. You love them all, but some give you more trouble than others. So let's look at one of the more problematic sections of WISE called the class student tab.
summary
A good system simplifies the mundane. The summary screen needed to exemplify this. This page contains everything a teacher does every day in their class:
Need to take roll? Check. Mark whether reading assignments were done? Check. What about taking notes or seeing a student's status? All done here.
-
ATTENDANCE
We needed a view where teachers not only took today's attendance but could also review and amend past roll logs. This was the solution. This screen lets teachers easily see what days are or aren't fully marked and make changes where necessary.
-
READING
A basic reading checklist. What could be simpler? List out the students, add a date selector, and add a checkbox for each student. Simple, right?
Funnily enough, the most straightforward view for Seminary was quite tricky for Institute. They have nested reading dependencies and required links to said readings.
Yikes.
-
Credit
Management wanted to help teachers recognize if students were failing or falling behind. The credit screen addresses those needs by highlighting problem areas and providing a summary analysis.
The system knows the required amount of attendance and reading students need to pass and flags anyone lagging.
-
SchEdule
At last, something simple! We just need a way to add students to the class. Sounds easy!
But then we remember, students literally come from anywhere in the world. We have to create a robust search to ensure admins find the correct student from hundreds of potential duplicates.
After a search is made, we collapse the search fields and display the resulting student list. All listings need to display any active statuses.
Students can then be selected and added to the class. Admins also use this screen to unenroll students from their classes.
-
While this process is just a taste of the complexity of WISE, it highlights the perpetual challenge of making something full-featured but streamlined enough for constant use.
Designing an interface that will be used daily is always a challenge. Get it wrong, and the process becomes a chore. Get it right, and nobody notices. That's oddly my goal with most of my designs: users forget anyone ever designed it.
It just works.