Setup is the Hardest Part of Assessment
Examsoft’s legacy interface led with the concept of managing and organizing its question database as soon as a teacher logged into the platform. While in the field, we discovered that the majority of work that gets done for building and facilitating assessments has more to do with the planning of an assessment than with building it. Creating and selecting questions turned out to be one of the last and least time-consuming steps, as instructors would typically reuse assessments they had created in the past or would leverage a team to create or select questions. We found that we would need to lead with planning tools, that allowed instructors to set up the cohorts, times, and scenarios for conducting their assessments.

A Wide Variety of Assessment Scenarios
When you imagine an assessment, you likely imagine a cohort of young people in a classroom environment heads down filling in multiple-choice bubbles. The assessment landscape is much more complex. Imagine you needed to assess a veterinarian student's approach to doing a checkup on a horse for example, which might need to be done in a barn, with no internet connection, and would require a rubric-oriented grading system instead of a question-and-answer oriented test. These types of scenarios had major implications for the product design.