The goal of Newsela is to provide meaningful classroom content for every student, specifically through the use of current events and partner content. We offer a library of articles to teachers and students with customizable Lexile levels, along with various assignments for them to complete."

At Newsela, the product process is divided into three phases: discovery, ideation, and definition. With the general goal set out, we moved into the discovery phase for the admin reporting project.

Our plan was to kick off discovery with a Discovery Workshop that included all key figures in the product, technology, and customer teams. This required those of us on the direct product team (the product manager, my fellow product designer, and me) to engage in pre-planning for the workshop, including gathering research and building the workshop format.

In our discovery workshop, the sequence broke up into three stages over the course of the two-day work session: defining the initiative, reviewing past research, and prototyping basic flows.

Our first stage was to formally define the initiative. Initially, we divided all workshop participants into two groups, and tasked each to create their own definition of the business goal for the Admin reporting experience. Subsequently, we engaged in discussions around the two proposed goals and amalgamated the components that resonated with everyone to formulate the most accurate call to action. Our jointly conceived business goal is outlined below:

Stage two involved reviewing all relevant past research pertaining to the initiative. Our product manager led a walkthrough of insights we had drawn from both internally conducted and externally sourced research on administrator insight needs, as well as teacher insight needs.

Based on this previous research, it became evident that administrators required in-depth transparency into student and teacher usage and performance. Moreover, the ability to swiftly access an overview of their schools' overall successes and areas of growth was also deemed crucial. Additionally, we identified a distinction between the data needs of school administrators and district administrators: the former necessitates more detailed information, while the latter primarily requires high-level insights.

We concluded the workshop with the third stage: prototyping the basic user flow. We rejoined in our previously defined groups with the objective of conceptualizing potential optimal user flows. These were crafted while considering the recently defined business goal and research findings. Each individual members of their group contributed their own ideas, and subsequently, each group composed their own unified flow guided by the respective product designer of each team. These user flows would later be elaborated upon and tested in the subsequent phase: ideation.