Overview

Professors and teachers sign up for GitHub Classroom to manage their students’ coding assignments. I had just joined the Classroom team as the first designer when, in the process of conducting usability testing for a beta feature, I uncovered a more serious issue: many new users were left stranded during the signup authentication process or disoriented about what to do next.

Through subsequent research sessions, we made improvements to the onboarding experience by revising the IA and setup sequence to align with teachers’ workflows and mental models. We shipped in time to see a nearly 30% increase in student assignments submitted in Q1.