Barbri Accessibility & Hueristic Audit
Heuristic audit and roadmap pave a clear path to addressing over 180 accessibility concerns
summary
mission
Barbri, a leader in bar exam preparation for law students, faced increasing pressure from new competitors. While confident in the strength of their content, they suspected their product experience lacked engagement and enjoyment, and partnered with Openfield to identify where to focus and prioritize meaningful next steps.
my contributions
What started out as a short-term project to help Barbri pinpoint and address potential problem-areas turned into a year-long engagement in which I led discovery sessions, devised a heuristic audit to evaluate the current platform, curated a roadmap to prioritize our actionable next steps.
kickoff
project kickoff
In order to understand the history of the problem we were presented with, I began by synthesizing existing documentation, personas, stakeholder hypotheses, and competitive pressures into a shared understanding of user friction, engagement gaps, and systemic experience issues. By aligning the team early on problem definition and success criteria, we established a strong foundation for focused evaluation and long-term impact.
identifying pain points
Discovery sessions
Generate high-quality questions quickly
Maintain pedagogical intent and teaching voice
Feel confident deploying questions live, without heavy editing
Heuristic & accessibility audits
Reduce question creation timeIncrease usage of in-class assessments
Train the system to consistently generate high-quality content based on user feedback
Build trust and adoption of AI features within iClicker
outcomes
deliverables
We translated insights from the discovery sessions and accessibility audit into an actionable roadmap by synthesizing patterns across user pain points, accessibility gaps, and systemic experience issues. I led the prioritization of both short- and long-term opportunities by balancing user impact, effort, and strategic value, ensuring the plan was realistic and achievable. The resulting roadmap provided Barbri with a focused, phased action plan that maintained momentum while guiding teams toward meaningful, sustainable improvements over time.
reflection
After handing deliverables off to the Barbri team, I conducted a retrospective activity with our team in order to identify process pain points and wins. We identified a few opportunity areas to facilitate the audit process in the future, such as maintaining the same team members throughout the entire discovery process to ensure every member has sufficient context to provide feedback, grouping criteria in the heuristic audit in a way that reduces time spent on testing, and creating a template for providing clear results and summaries.
Our heuristic audit proved to be a major success, not only in providing a consistent method for assessing accessibility criteria, but for exposing our team to the standard of accessibility we should strive for in each of our projects.
