Turnitin
November 2014 - December 2016
A vision for Turnitin (2016)
I co-designed Turnitin’s first design system in partnership with educators and students from the UK and USA.
Turnitin checks student submissions against a vast database of academic papers, websites and other resources to identify potential instances of plagiarism. It is used by over 50 million educators and students in more than 10,000 schools and universities worldwide, to ensure originality in student work, to improve writing skills, and to support fair assessment practices.
In the UK and USA, I actively engaged with both Educators and Students to assess their relationship with Turnitin and their context of use. Awareness of the product varied considerably between both roles. Many students interacted with Turnitin via learning management systems (LMS) such as Blackboard, whilst Educators engaged with Turnitin’s suite of products directly.
A design system for every channel
As well as mobile responsiveness and multi-lingual design, a key consideration for Turnitin’s design system was its adaptability from their web application to integrating with learning management systems (LMS). For instance, students would not require a menu within an LMS, but educators would require a menu when working within the Turnitin app. Therefore, we visually split the navigation from the primary content.
Turnitin’s design system was designed to be used in every learning management system, in every language, on every device, for everyone
Using paper prototyping to explore navigation interaction (left) and defining core workflows (right)
A design system for everyone
In order to realise our ambitions for the design system, I established Turnitin’s first accessibility guild, involving colleagues from Oakland to Utrecht, in order to leverage our existing capabilities and build consensus. I also organised their first Global Accessibility Awareness Day to educate and inspire. This involved procuring specialist training for Product Managers, Designers, Developers, Researchers and Writers, as well as a game of goalball on the fourth floor!
I organised and led Turnitin’s first Global Accessibility Awareness Day in 2016
Turnitin as part of an EdTech ecosystem
Turnitin forms part of a much larger education technology ecosystem and it was critical that we identified how Educators and Students were using other tools in conjunction with Turnitin. For instance, Google for Education offers schools, colleges and universities free access to Google’s extensive suite of tools. I carried out user research with High School teachers from the United States to understand when, how, where and why they use Turnitin and Google together, and what an integration between them both might look like.
N.B. Usability studies and user research reports available upon request