UX update to parent reports in ClassDojo

Yuriy Sklyar

3 min readSep 15, 2019

You are a parent.

This is your child.

You look at their report.

All you can think about is “0 Positive” at this point…

Two things immediately jump to mind:

#1: “0 positive” of “what”, exactly?

#2: Dang, Danny isn’t doing too good?

Let us explore this micro experience further…

That’s Danil in the middle, great.

There’s a close button, fantastic — first thing people see scanning from left to right…

And some type of “This Week” link that appears to be a dropdown of some sort.

I was right in my observation, after clicking “This Week”, a dropdown appeared with two other options: “Last Week” and “Two weeks ago”.

#justbecauseimagrammarnazi — why does everything come with capitals, and the “Two weeks ago” is lower case? Either that or that — not both.

I happened to land on this page on Sunday, so technically speaking this should still be showing me previous week, and only start a new one with upcoming Monday (my time, not your server time)…

I select “Last Week” to see what happens.

OK! Things aren’t as bad as I thought they were…

Which brings me to my next point.

Why oversimplify design just to over-complicate the experience of something that shouldn’t even be thought twice about.

By default, there shouldn’t be any actions required in order to digest the content. It (content) must be there, waiting for me to see it without having to take any secondary action. This is [un]common sense.

How would one go about improving such an experience, you may ask?

Let’s take a look:

I want to be able to know that my son has more than just 6 positive points this year.

As much as possible is how much I’d like to see, so in this case, having points be filter-dependent isn’t the best strategy in my opinion.

I still can’t figure out why the need for this dating dropdown. I really don’t see why anyone would ever need to know how many badges their kid got two weeks ago, or a month ago. As long as the count looks high, that will help me sleep better at night.

For weeks that do not have any data, there should be a message included as leaving them empty leaves too many questions.

The list should be a scrollable timeline, with week/month separators to form logical groups of content. Timelines/notifications have been done SO many times, why not follow the standards?

Size of fonts should also be decreased quite a bit. This isn’t supposed to be a visual experience, it is supposed to be an information experience, and as such, when users digest information/data, it is imperative to show them as much of it as possible in this already small modal, which, as I’m sure some of you might have noticed, has been also scaled down in width— there is absolutely no need for all the extra white space in this case.

I’m sure even this design leaves a lot on the table… Things could be done differently — from the ground up, however sometimes change isn’t as easy to come by, so a small tweak such as this is surely a welcomed change.

Where to find me online:

I document quite a bit on my personal blog: www.yuriysklyar.com

UX update to parent reports in ClassDojo

Where to find me online:

Written by Yuriy Sklyar