Edtech / Inspera AS
2025
Product Design
User research
Prototyping
A/B testing
Gen AI integration
Visual Design
OVERVIEW
As part of Inspera’s strategic expansion across Europe, Australia, and potentially the U.S., the company initiated a complete redesign of its Author module - a web-app used by university professors to create and manage digital assessments.
*Screen obscured because of NDA. Contact for further details.
BACKGROUND
Inspera AS is a Norwegian edtech company that provides a secure, flexible digital assessment platform used by schools, universities, and government agencies to deliver and manage exams online. Learn more what Inspera does.
"I joined Inspera as one of the five designers in the company. It was dope - a close knit team - where we were supporting design across every aspect of the business. I was responsible to drive and lead UX and UI across the key parts of the application experience."
CHALLENGE
There were two different versions of Author module, Legacy Author and Author 2.0.
01
Legacy Author and Author 2.0 did the same job but differently and with their own complications and feature-set.
02
Smaller working space for our customers within the webapp,with unclear visual structure.
03
Lack of design function in Author 2.0 which made the assessments uncustomizable.
04
Prevalence of visual clutter, with duplication of menu options.
UNDERSTANDING THE USER : AUTHOR
Goals
An Author’s primary goal is to compose questions that are both clear and effective, ensuring they align appropriately with the intended learning objectives and anticipated levels of difficulty.
Behaviours
Authors prefer familiar question formats suited to their subject and often abstain from exploring other question formats. They typically create new questions each time using a structured approach to maintain assessment quality.
Pain points
-
Wide age range among users creates tech adoption challenges.
-
Low awareness of benefits in reusing past questions.
-
No support for bulk-creating similar questions across assessments.
-
Poor content discovery due to disorganized and manual workflows
-
Lack of insights into past performance leads to repeated use of outdated or irrelevant questions.
KILLING TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE
What if the redesign could solve UX issues and pain points
of our users at once?
New version was simplify called "New Author" to reflect our approach.
NEW AUTHOR IMPROVEMENTS
-
Single unified New Author with all features incorporated and some more.
-
Enhancing the real estate for our users to work with good visual hierarchy.
-
Introducing Design feature in New Author for added customization options
-
Removing visual clutter, duplication of UI, and increasing workspace.
NON DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT
This project is connected to Gen-AI integration project and Item Bank project, and are intertwined with each other. Therefore, this project is under NDA and thus further details cannot be shared at this moment. But I'd love to walk you through in our 1 - 1 meeting.
IDENTIFYING OPPORTUNITIES
-
Use metadata, AI labeling, and better structure to simplify content management.
-
Enable bulk question authoring to boost efficiency.
-
Introduce improved collaboration tools within Inspera through Item Banking and User Roles.
-
Leverage AI to generate questions from Word or paper-based inputs.
PROJECT OUTCOMES FOR NEW AUTHOR
Conducting customer feedback sessions along with User Testing revealed that :
-
User feedback suggested there was a considerable improvement in perceived structure of the digital question set
-
Users could find UI buttons (for e.g. full screen toggle button) 40% faster than before.
-
Customer loved the AI aided suggestions and emphasized on how their productivity increased.
-
Efficient utilization of screen real estate enabled a larger canvas for authors, helping with accessibility.
-
De-cluttering of UI helped ease cognitive load, and helped users remember where to find what they are looking for.
-
WCAG 2.0 compliant designs, enabling structured screen reading for users with partial blindness.
