Hands with box orange Case Study

Bullseye

We built a real-time data collection tool that empowers educators to track learner mastery and provide individualized data-driven instruction and coaching.

Technology: Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Postgres

Capabilities: Full Stack Development, Product Development, Strategy, UX Design

Engagement: Rapid Prototype

The Business Case

Bullseye planned to build a new generation of educational software that enables instructors and administrators to constantly improve their educational systems using real-time data and actionable analytics.

The Partnership

Ryan launched Bullseye in 2016 with the goal of developing a software pilot for his primary audience to experiment with. He set out to look for a technical cofounder to build the product but wasn’t able to find the right individual. Ryan found Haught Codeworks on LinkedIn and called soon after. In the first call, we spent about an hour and a half on the phone with Ryan and he selected us to build the software to pilot the product.

“Haught Codeworks’ approach to building prototypes helped us dial in the best feature set for our product. We were able to get a minimum viable product into the hands of our customers quickly so they could provide feedback about additional features that would be most valuable to them.”
– Ryan Cristal, Founder & CEO

The Work

We started by working with Bullseye to decide what measurements would appropriately track student’s progress through different subjects. This information is the key to understanding a student’s progression through the instruction and personalizing the experience so instructors know what lessons were working well and what material needed to be reviewed with subsets of students.

Once measurements were decided on, we used a rapid prototyping approach to create a minimum viable product on the Ruby on Rails platform. Features that weren’t absolutely key were deferred so Bullseye could present a lean version of the software for testing. These essential features were further refined and validated through user feedback.

The initial software offering was well-received, so we began to build and introduce expanded features. We continue to work with Bullseye to gather feedback for sharper and more flexible features in future versions.

Lessons Learned

Throughout a lean build, we always learn something that causes us to adjust our course. When we first started this project, Bullseye realized that the scope of work for the full product build was larger than originally thought.

We have worked with a lot of entrepreneurs building their first product and have seen first hand what works and what frequently doesn’t work so we are able to serve as a valuable thought partner in business strategy in addition to our technical expertise.

The Results

In partnership with Bullseye, we built an application that allows educators to create a progression of objectives, grouped in a framework.

The specific kind of framework is up to the educator – they can use the more common frameworks like Common Core ELA or Math, or they can choose to create their own custom framework that can focus on any progression of skills they want to track, even if they’re niche areas of study like work-related objectives or more “ephemeral” areas of study like character development.

The software is also flexible in wider applications – it was originally designed to be used to analyze primary education, but its mastery tracking can now be applied to individual mentoring, professional development, or just about any other educational situation.

In the end, we were able to work with Bullseye on a program that we feel will play an essential role in retailoring the way educators work with their students.

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