UX Research • EdTech • Mixed Methods • Feature Addition • Concept Design
Project
Infinite Campus Connect
Role
UX Researcher & Designer
TYpe
Concept feature addition
Deliverable
Phased roadmap & Phase 1 feature definition
Research redirected the problem from planning to platform trust.
the context
Every weeknight in my house, the same conversation happens. Infinite Campus says an assignment is missing. My 13-year-old swears he turned it in. Nobody can prove either thing without opening Schoology, digging through six clicks of nested folders, and, if we're lucky, finding a submission timestamp buried on a detail page.
Even in a tech-literate family that pays attention to homework, the platforms don't reliably tell us "did you turn it in?"
Once the missing flag is resolved, accepted, or set aside, the conversation moves on to what's next. Which missing assignment to chase down first? What's due tomorrow that we should look at tonight? How to set up the next week so we're not having the same conversation Wednesday? None of those questions have answers in IC or Schoology either. There's no view that ranks what to work on and no view that surfaces what's coming far enough ahead to plan around.
Infinite Campus is the district's system of record for grades. Schoology contains the assignments themselves: instructions, attachments, links, submission buttons. The two platforms are designed to sync submission status, and the sync isn't trustworthy. Middle school students and parents are expected to coordinate between them.
Framing this as a feature addition to Infinite Campus, rather than a standalone app, was a deliberate choice. Districts already pay for both platforms. Families already use them. A new app would require new procurement, new logins, new behavior change, and a FERPA conversation. A feature inside an existing platform does not.
The design question narrowed.
What is the smallest change inside a platform families already use that would meaningfully reduce the nightly platform-coordination problem?
Research Approach
Phase 1A — Landscape
The first question was whether the platform-coordination problem already had a solution. Schoology and Infinite Campus have an official integration documented to sync rosters and pass grades between the systems. Beyond that, district middleware like Clever, ClassLink, and Edlink handles single sign-on and class roster syncing. None of these tools surface a unified, family-facing view of assignment status. IC's own parent and student apps show high-level flags like missing, due today, and due tomorrow. Assignments marked missing don't automatically clear once a student submits. Verifying a submission means navigating to Schoology to look for the timestamp. The bridge category moved data; it didn't present it in an actionable way to students or parents.
That raised a hypothesis: maybe a consumer planner had solved the problem from the user side, without integration. Five student planners were reviewed: Notion, Todoist, myHomework, MyStudyLife, and Power Planner. Each had a clear strength. Notion's flexible databases let students build any view they wanted. Todoist handled quick capture and natural-language dates. myHomework worked from an academic calendar with class-based color-coding. MyStudyLife combined timetables, tasks, and exams in one view. Power Planner forecast GPA impact from individual assignments. None integrated with LMS or SIS data, and the category wasn't built to.
IC is authoritative for grades. What was missing was a way to resolve missing-assignment flags with confidence.
The whitespace sat at the intersection of the two categories. That informed what secondary research looked at: whether the problem was real at scale, and which part of it mattered most to families.
Phase 1B — Secondary Research · 12 Sources
Twelve sources reviewed across App Store reviews, Reddit, district documentation, student newspapers, and one prior UX case study on IC. The most useful sources were the ones closest to the people affected.
Key secondary sources
Campus Parent iOS App — 1.9 stars. Missing-assignment notifications arrive weeks after teachers update grades. The red notification badge has not worked reliably for users who reviewed it. Notification failure is documented across the user base, not in isolated reports.
Schoology iOS App — 1.3 stars. Reviews name teacher inconsistency as the primary navigation failure. Users cannot find assignments when teacher folder structures vary. The pattern is structural across teachers, not specific to individual users.
Saint Paul Public Schools and White Plains Public Schools — District Documentation. Both official documents confirm at the infrastructure level that the Submitted flag does not sync correctly between Schoology and IC. The failure is documented by the districts themselves.
Primary research could move from confirming the failure to learning how families experienced it day to day.
Phase 1C — Primary Research
Three core hypotheses going in:
1
The failure is partly inside each platform and partly in the coordination gap between them.
2
The "false missing" problem erodes trust in IC's other signals.
3
Middle school students will struggle to reconcile two systems manually on their own.
Convenience recruiting introduced a potential bias toward engaged, tech-literate, two-parent families. The households most acutely harmed by these platforms are the least likely to respond to an interview request.
Ten interviews ran across five parent-and-student pairs. Sessions ran 15 to 30 minutes each. Grades 6, 7, and 8 were all represented. The sample included one parent and student navigating the platforms in a second language and two neurodivergent students, one with an IEP and one with a 504.
What the interviews surfaced reframed the project.
What the Research uncovered
Before the interviews, competitive analysis and early observational evidence both pointed at prioritization as the unsolved gap. Interviews revealed students had already solved that with their own workarounds. Platform trust was the more acute pain.
Nine themes emerged from the affinity map. Four surfaced as Phase 1 priorities.
FALSE MISSING UNDERMINES IC AS A Trusted SOURCE
Seven of ten participants raised the false-missing problem. P04 named it the single most frustrating part of the experience. The flag stayed up across the family's view of IC, even when students had submitted in Schoology.
PARENTS CAN'T INDEPENDENTLY VERIFY SUBMISSIONS
Parents resolved missing flags by relying on teacher emails or asking their child. Some took the student's word. Others had to demand proof from their own child. None used the platform itself to confirm.
"It shows missing, but she's already turned it in."
— P02, parent of a 6th grader
NAVIGATION FRICTION IS STRUCTURAL ACROSS THE SAMPLE
S05 counted six or more clicks to reach an assignment in Schoology. Folder structures varied teacher to teacher, so the path families learned for one class didn't necessarily carry to the next.
EVERY STUDENT HAS A DIFFERENT WORKAROUND
Reminders app, Notes app, wall calendar, whiteboard, writing on her arm. Five students, five systems. No shared solution to build on.
"Too many steps, too many choices."
S01, 7th grader navigating the platforms in a second language
The findings shared a pattern. While the platforms held the data, families held the work of making sense of it: navigating Schoology to find an assignment, leaving the platform to verify a submission, and building a planning system somewhere else.
"If you had to ask a teacher to verify a [missing assignment] submission every single time, that's the only thing that they would be doing."
— P04, parent of a 7th grader
From Research to Roadmap
Nine themes from the affinity map collapsed into four phases and a backlog. The sequencing was not about feature priority. It was about what each phase made possible for the next.
Phase 1 came first because nothing else works without platform trust. Phase 2 is a research phase, not a feature phase, because input from teachers guides the direction of Phase 3.
Prioritization went to the backlog. The research showed students had already solved that one with workarounds outside the platforms.
Phase 1
Trust and verification
Establish platform trust. Give parents a reliable way to confirm whether an assignment was turned in.
Phase 2
Teacher research
Three to four interviews to understand teachers' day-to-day workflows and where the tools they use, including IC and Schoology, fit in.
Phase 3
Daily friction
Notification alignment, navigation friction, assignment-format metadata, and submission instructions at the point of need. Scope depends on what Phase 2 reveals.
Phase 4
Parent Visibility
Parent access to completed work. Support for parents who want to stay informed without becoming the active tracker.
Backlog
Prioritization support
Every student already has a workaround for understanding what was most important to work on and when. Five different systems across five students point to unmet need, not a solved problem.
Cross-Cutting Requirement
One requirement runs through every phase: equitable access across languages, platform versions, and levels of parental engagement. The bias warning from the research design carries into every design decision downstream.
Next Steps
1
Finalize Phase 1 design and run usability tests.
Phase 1 design is underway. A few directions for the submission-verification feature are in development, and the strongest one will go into a moderated usability test with parents before the final definition.
2
Complete teacher interviews and synthesize findings.
Three to four sessions across grade levels and subject areas. The conversations cover how teachers post assignments, structure their classes, and handle missing work, alongside what would make a new feature actually fit into their day. Synthesis sharpens what the next phase of work should focus on.