#blackboardmobile

Coach Jenny: We ended up having a good first season, especially coming back from two initial loses. With a final record of 3-4-2, and I believe this puts us in 7th place out of 12 teams. We're talking about entering into next season which starts in two weeks!

To celebrate the Mobile Learn 4.0 launch our team designed some super cool sweatshirts and patches.  

Here's one of our Mobile Learn Support Ninja's, Michael Beler, ironing on his patch.  We decided to go with patches so the team could customize their sweatshirts, just like users customize their experience in our app! 

Internally, we've been calling Mobile Learn 4.0 Tesla (not the car company). According to the Mobile Learn Product Manager, Dori Rutkevitz, "We decided to name each major release in 4.x according to big thinkers who have inspired us. We threw around some names and decided to start with Tesla.  The team was inspired by the 'Why Tesla is the Greatest Geek Ever' comic by the Oatmeal, a fantastic cartoon."

In addition to getting these sweet threads, the team went on a field trip to the SF Exploratorium on Wednesday.  The museum is fantastic and inspired us all as we tinkered and experimented with the cool hands-on exhibits.

Meet Blackboard SF's newest team member - Staniel Chrischard, M.D.

A native of the waters, Staniel Chrischard, M.D. holds a doctorate in podiatry. He is thrilled to be part of a balanced ecosystem that doubles as an deluxe aquatic bachelor pad suite. While basil and wheatgrass sprout on his roof, he swims actively about his plastic day-glo environs. When the work day is over, he whips out his glow sticks and raves all night long against the neon glow. His favorite leisure activities are dining on pellets, flaring his fins, and raving.

It's back to school season and for many people it's a time to start anew.  Students all over the world are starting a new chapter of their lives.  They're setting up their dorm rooms, sporting fresh clothes, and some are even moving out of their childhood homes for the first time.  

For Blackboard Mobile Learn, back to school season is no different.  

Today we'd like to introduce Mobile Learn 4.0, a complete redesign of our app, available now on iOS and Android.  For Mobile Learn 4.0 we went back to the drawing board, looking at feedback from students, teachers, and instructional designers.  In addition, we incorporated evolving design paradigms and our app analytics to design an experience that makes using the app even more intuitive, simple, and fun.  

"First and foremost the Mobile Learn experience is about reading, so the new user interface is much cleaner and simpler," says the lead designer on Mobile Learn 4.0, Tyler Hansen.  "The cork board and general skeuomorphism of the previous design didn't make reading easier, in fact in some cases it made it more difficult. After all, mobile is designed and mainly used for content consumption."

 Not to say we didn't like the old design, it's just time for Mobile Learn to grow up a bit. "It can now be taken a little more seriously than before, though it hasn't lost all of its fun." Tyler notes that the team has engineered lots of cool animations and transitions that are rooted in fun user experience rather than mimicking analog metaphors (sticky notes and chalkboards) to lighten the app experience.

Mobile Learn 4.0 offers a more personal experience for our users.  You can now rename your courses (who calls their course ECON-104-SEC-45 anyways?), reorder them, hide ones you never use on your phone (maybe courses from last year), and even associate a color label to a course so that every piece of new content in the app will correspond to its specific course.   

Updating an app with as many users as ours was not an easy task and we went through countless design revisions.  We explored different navigation paradigms, varying color schemes, and lots of user interfaces.

***original mockups***  

***original mockups***

After months of work we're incredibly proud of the app we've put in the hands of our users.  After a day in the wild we're seeing some awesome feedback on Twitter, in the App Store, and Google Play.  

It's no casual affair to reimagine a product you work on every day and it's incredibly stressful to await the response of your users.  It takes a lot more people than you might think to make an app like this a reality-- you have device engineers working on the iOS and Android code, backend engineers who tie it all into the school's Blackboard Learn system, an incredible QA team to make sure there are no issues or bugs, an End User support team who work with users to help troubleshoot issues and collect their feedback, a design team who focuses on user interface and user experience, a marketing team to spread the word about the app, and of course a product management team.  All these people worked together over the last year to make this app a reality and help millions of students in their pursuit of an education.  

Last week I packed up my bags and headed east.  I had the chance to work out of the Blackboard HQ office in Washington, DC and I jumped on the opportunity.  After a few days my thin San Francisco skin got used to the heat and humidity of an actual summer and I felt right at home in our nation's capital.  The Blackboard office occupies about 3.5 floors of a building next to Chinatown, just like our offices in SF.  

The Mobile team members in this office are mostly in sales and marketing and spend a lot of their time talking with Mosaic and Mobile Learn customers, as well as working with the larger organization to get more visibility into the products we support.  In addition to sales and marketing, our DC peeps are client managers, inside sales reps, and business development professionals.  

The main office hosts a huge number of people who focus their attention on different markets, clients, and products all over the world.    

    If you're ever in DC for fun, or if you make it out there for Blackboard, the office is full of great people.  And, being a true San Franciscan, I found some really good food right around the office: