EdTech — Overhauling Announcement Addressing
The Challenge
The previous recipient selection (To-line) experience for sending announcements was cumbersome, confusing, and error-prone. Users struggled to understand how to select recipients across schools, classrooms, and individuals — leading to inefficiencies, frustration, and a lack of trust in the system.
Our in depth research surfaced clear pain points:
Users had to select a recipient list before filtering by staff, guardians, or students — an unintuitive experience.
Teachers and admins worried about sending announcements to the wrong people due to unclear selections and inability to see previously selected recipients.
No way to multi-select across schools, classrooms, and individuals in one flow.
Lack of filtering and search options slowed down workflows.
The recipient display didn’t update dynamically based on user roles or permissions, causing confusion.
“As a principal, I’m trying to choose my parents or staff easily so I can avoid sending announcements to the wrong recipients, but the current interface makes me feel confused and worried about making mistakes.”
Our hypothesis was simple: by improving search, filtering, and multi-select capabilities — and by surfacing clear feedback on selected recipients — we could drive a significant increase in user satisfaction and productivity.
Solution
We redesigned the Announcement Addressing (To-line) experience to support fast, flexible, and intuitive recipient selection across any context: schools, classrooms, and individuals.
Key improvements included:
A simplified smart search bar allowing users to select any recipient type from one input.
Support for multi-selecting across schools, classrooms, and individuals in a single flow.
Dynamic filters for narrowing down large lists (staff, guardians, students).
A clear visual summary of selected recipients with inline editing/removal.
Recipient display dynamically updated based on user roles and permissions — only showing lists a user could send to.
Improved error handling and confirmation patterns before sending.
My Role
As the lead UX designer on this project, I was responsible for:
Creating interactive prototypes and usability test scripts.
Running user testing and incorporating feedback to validate usability and clarity.
Synthesizing research findings and understanding deeply how to address users needs.
Mapping out pain points in the existing flow.
Designing and iterating on the new recipient selector interface.
Partnering with product and engineering to define technical constraints and user permissions logic.
Constraints, Assumptions, Risks & Dependencies
Performance Risks
We needed to ensure that search and filtering functionality would be fast and reliable — even for customers managing large directories across multiple schools. Since the feature supported multi-selecting from hundreds (or thousands) of users, performance was a key consideration in how results were displayed and paginated.
Usability Risks
While we were introducing more flexibility and control for tech-savvy users, we were mindful that too much complexity could overwhelm less technical users like busy teachers. It was critical to balance search and filter functionality with an interface that felt approachable and easy to understand at a glance.
Transparency Risks
Giving users more visibility into recipient selections also meant exposing potential edge cases — like permission restrictions or role-based limitations. We needed to design with clarity, utilizing helpful microcopy and smart defaults to prevent confusion or mistakes.
Delivery Risk
This project was closely tied to a hard back-to-school timeline. To meet this, we prioritized the highest-impact functionality for MVP — focusing on multi-select, smart search, and filtering — while deprioritizing lower-priority enhancements (like recent lists or saved audiences) for future iterations.
My Approach
I started by auditing the existing experience and mapping out key user pain points from our research. It was clear users needed more flexibility and clarity when selecting recipients — but without adding friction or complexity to their workflow.
I explored different patterns for how users could search, filter, and select recipients across schools, classrooms, and individuals. Collaborating closely with product and engineering, I designed an experience that supported both savvy users managing large directories and teachers sending quick classroom messages. I created interactive prototypes and validated early concepts through user testing and iterated based on feedback until the flow felt intuitive, fast, and scalable.
The Design
The final design introduced a clean, unified search bar that allowed users to select any combination of recipients from across the platform — schools, classrooms, or individuals. Selected recipients appeared as visual chips, making it easy to review or remove selections at a glance. For large lists, users could filter results by role (staff, guardians, students) or context (school, grade, classroom). The design prioritized transparency, showing a summary of who would receive the message before sending, and included smart defaults and inline editing to prevent errors.
The Impact
After demoing the new addressing experience, user feedback was overwhelmingly positive. All participants in user testing rated the new flow 5/5 for ease of use and clarity. Administrators and teachers reported feeling more confident in knowing exactly who would receive their announcements, and internal support teams saw a noticeable drop in tickets related to recipient confusion. The redesign not only improved the speed and accuracy of sending announcements — it laid the foundation for future improvements like saved recipient lists and advanced audience management.
Reflection
This project was a great example of designing for real-world constraints while staying grounded in user needs. The final design I created aimed to solve long-standing pain points with clarity, flexibility, and efficiency — and user feedback during testing validated that we were moving in the right direction.
However, as we moved closer to development, a number of the proposed features — like recent lists, more advanced filtering, selecting any combination of recipients, and visual chips to show selected recipients — were ultimately deprioritized due to engineering complexity and tight timelines. While it was disappointing to see parts of the vision scaled back, I worked closely with product and engineering to ensure the most critical improvements made it into the initial release.
I’m proud of the foundation this redesign created and confident that the system is now better positioned to evolve over time. In future iterations, I’d love to revisit some of the higher-impact features that didn’t make it into MVP — particularly those that support faster workflows for repeat senders and large districts.