2024/2025 · Onboarding · Finance Portals · Web Design
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AMICUS
Duration
3 Months
Project Type
Generative AI
Web Design
My Role
UX Lead
Front End Dev
Target Users
Internal Staff
300+ Teachers
Contribution
User Reasearch
Flow Design
High Fidelity Design
Front End Dev
Outcome
Reduced Staff Leavers
Increase in staff support satisfaction
Overview
Amicus is an internal tool built for Inspired’s teaching staff to streamline lesson preparation. It generates high-quality materials—PowerPoints, handouts, and other resources—by leveraging generative AI to produce personalised, curriculum-aligned outputs. The goal was to cut time spent on admin and content production so teachers could focus on student interaction and delivery.
Amicus emphasised secure access (Microsoft 365 login), clarity, and teacher control. The tool provides transparent, guided prompting and keeps outputs aligned to internal educational resources, ensuring reliability and consistency with school standards.
My Role
- End-to-end UX/UI: Led research, flows, wireframes, prototypes, and UI design for web and mobile.
- User research & feedback: Planned interviews and surveys; analysed Hotjar and usage data to iterate.
- Design–dev collaboration: Worked closely with engineers to ship performant, intuitive interfaces.
- Feature evolution: Prioritised and specified new capabilities based on teacher feedback (e.g., image uploads, Amicus Together).
Flow Analysis
- Access control: Staff-only via private portal with Microsoft 365 authentication.
- Device flexibility: Optimised for both desktop and mobile with a consistent UI.
- Guardrails: No student-facing version; kept usage focused on trained staff to mitigate misuse.
- Usage monitoring: Internal dashboard tracked adoption, effectiveness, and improvement opportunities.
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The Problem
- Time wasting: Teaching staff spend a lot of time on lesson prep.
- Reliability: Ensure AI outputs were grounded in internal curriculum resources (avoid “rogue” info).
- Adoption: Reduce apprehension around new tech; make Amicus feel supportive, not intimidating.
- Focus: Prevent conversational/off-topic use and keep flows centred on lesson creation.
- Assistive, not autonomous: Increase efficiency while keeping teachers in the loop; AI drafts are a starting point that require review and adaptation.
- Protect pedagogy: Improve throughput without eroding teacher agency—materials must remain editable and guided by curriculum and professional expertise.
The Solution
- Simplified approach: Original wireframes offered very granular settings and adjustments but we later decided to strip this back to a very simple "content in / content out" approach to make it intuitive for teachers of all tech levels to understand.
- Structured prompting: A simple three-step flow: Setup (context, e.g., “Year 11 English teacher”), Prompt (task, e.g., “Lesson plan on Battle of Hastings”), Creativity (renamed from “temperature” for clarity).
- Grounded content: Outputs aligned to internal resources and standards to maintain accuracy.
- Transparency & control: Clear UI copy emphasised that Amicus augments, not replaces, teacher expertise.
- Feedback loop: In-product feedback and feature requests informed continuous improvement.
- Training & support: Staff training materials and an always-available support button improved confidence.
- Key additions: Image uploads for richer context, and Amicus Together to share effective setups and materials among teachers.
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Impact
- Efficiency: Teachers reported saving hours per week on lesson prep.
- Adoption: Steady uptake across multiple Inspired campuses.
- Collaboration: Cultural shift toward sharing via Amicus Together.
- Retention: Internal surveys indicated annual teacher leaver rates dropped from ~65 to ~25.
- Perceived enablement: Survey questions such as: “Technology and processes support us in delivering educational excellence” saw a +17% improvement in positive responses year-over-year.
