Turnitin Clarity

Turnitin is an education technology company that provides a suite of solutions for academic institutions.

Clarity from Turnitin is designed to bring transparency to the student writing process by providing visibility to educators into their writing journey, including their use of AI tools along the way.

Supporting Academic Integrity in an Evolving Writing Landscape

For many educators, Turnitin has long been part of the everyday practice of teaching and assessment. Its tools have helped instructors think about academic integrity and originality while navigating the practical realities of grading, feedback, and evaluation. By offering signals that support authenticity checks alongside ways to review and respond to student writing, Turnitin has played a steady role in how educators interpret and engage with student submissions.

When Generative AI Changed How Writing Happens

Generative AI has fundamentally changed how students write. What was once a solitary process of drafting, revising, and struggling through ideas now often happens alongside powerful tools that can assist, accelerate, or even replace parts of that work. For educators, this shift introduces a new challenge: how to support responsible use of AI while still fostering critical thinking, resilience, and authentic learning. As traditional signals and final submissions become harder to interpret, educators are left asking a deeper question, not just what students submit, but how that writing comes to be.

To understand and empathize with this challenge, let’s step into Professor Richards’ classroom and follow her students’ writing journeys.

What instructors needed was not another score, but visibility into drafts, revisions, pacing, and patterns over time. Understanding the writing journey became essential to interpreting student work fairly and thoughtfully.

Introducing Turnitin Clarity

Turnitin Clarity was designed in response to this need. Rather than focusing solely on the final submission, Clarity provides instructors with insight into the full writing process, helping them see how a piece of writing evolved over time and how AI-assisted activity fits within that journey. The goal was not to replace educator judgment, but to support it,by pairing transparency with context in moments where interpretation matters most.

The Clarity ecosystem consists of a student writing environment called the Composition Workspace and a report detailing the writing process for the educators called the Writing Report.

Composition workspace

Composition workspace allows the student to begin, pause, resume and refine their work, all while enabling educators to gain insights into the students’ writing process. It also offers responsible and ethical use of AI based on permissions set for AI usage at the assignment level by the instructors.

Writing Report

Each submission generates a report for the instructors to view and interact with - The Writing Report. This report equips the instructors with the insights and supporting data into how students constructed their writing, from creation to submission, which aids in teaching students to write with integrity and foster more meaningful engagement between educators and students.

Shaping Instructor's Writing Report: My Role in the Design Journey

My Role

Product Designer (co-lead) the instructor report redesign

Timeline

November 2024 - August 2025

Team

UX (Design + Research + Content) | Product | Engineering

Deliverables

IA, Interaction Design, Usability testing prototypes, High-Fidelity UI, Responsive designs, Accessibility Annotations, Engineering hand off

Rethinking the Writing Report

By the time I joined the project, the first version of the Writing Report was developed and tested. During testing we found that for many instructors it wasn’t telling a clear story. Numbers, lists, and dense panels left educators unsure where to look or what conclusions they could fairly draw. The core tension boiled down to this: we had deep data, but not a digestible way to communicate meaning. My task was to rethink how the report could guide instructors from confusion to comprehension without losing richness.

I co-led a full redesign to create a clearer, more intuitive reporting experience.

Where the Writing Report Fell Short

Initial feedback on the Instructor Report indicated that instructors struggled to interpret it, navigate through it and comprehend the overall message that we were trying to convey about a students’ proof of process.

Screen 1: Instructor Inbox - An Entry Point - Provides Signals Without Context

Instructors begin by scanning submissions and looking at the data provided for each of them: Writing Report, Similarity and AI percentages. It is left up to the instructor to interpret them and decide how to proceed. Instructors proceed with uncertainty instead of clarity.

Across the report experience, instructors encountered rich data without guidance on how to interpret it. It lacked the structure and the hierarchy they needed to quickly understand what mattered and why. Rather than supporting understanding, the report asked instructors to do heavy cognitive work at every step. My design goal was to shift the experience from exposing information to guiding interpretation.

Designing for Clarity: Turning Data into a Writing Story

I had the time of 3 weeks to address the challenges and limitations of the earlier version of the Writing Report. Design sprinting was chosen to be a suitable approach. I led three week-long sprints, along with help from my team mates and research.

The sprint structure consisted of 6 major tasks :

Pick the themes and problems within to be solved
Brainstorm + Ideate on solution
Review new designs with UX team
Incorporate feedback
Generate prototype + Setup the test in Userlytics
Initiate user testing
Synthesize Findings from the test (solo + team)

With each sprint, I came up with the design decisions that helped solve for the challenges.

Establishing a Clear and Confident Entry Point

One of the earliest challenges instructors faced was not knowing where to begin. It was difficult for them to tell which submission required closer attention. Instructors were also unclear about what the Writing Report would reveal, making the decision to open a report feel uncertain rather than intentional.

To address this, I focused on providing a clear and confident starting point. Instead of asking instructors to interpret multiple signals on their own, the inbox now surfaces a snapshot of potential writing-process issues along with a preview of what those issues are. This approach helps instructors quickly understand why a submission is flagged and what they can expect to learn by opening the report.

Importantly, this design does not attempt to collapse similarity, AI, and writing-process signals into a single verdict. Each signal remains distinct, respecting the complexity of academic writing and instructor judgment. What changed was clarity: instructors can now prioritize submissions with confidence, knowing both which ones warrant attention and what kind of review lies ahead.

Reducing Cognitive Load Through Structure and Progressive Disclosure

Once inside the Writing Report, instructors were presented with critical data about the writing process. However, due to the lack of structure and hierarchy, it was difficult to understand what that data was actually conveying about the student’s writing journey. Was there a concern? If so, what was it, and how severe was it? It was also unclear where instructors should go next from this page. As a result, instructors were left to mentally piece together the story themselves which is a time-consuming and cognitively demanding task.

To address this, I focused on organizing writing-process data into clear categories and creating structured paths that instructors could move through intentionally across the report. Creating categories was much like sorting loose papers into meaningful piles - it helps people decide what to look at first. Within each category, hierarchy allowed broader signals and insights to surface before detailed evidence. With progressive disclosure, instructors could move from overview to detail without losing context, choosing when to dig deeper instead of being confronted with all data at once.

This approach required trading off more ambitious organizational models in favor of designs that could be implemented within tighter engineering timelines. Even so, the experience shifted meaningfully: instead of confronting a dense wall of metrics, instructors now see clear entry points and can navigate the report systematically, moving between insights and supporting evidence based on what they discover.

Creating a Coherent Story of the Writing Process

Once inside the report, another significant challenge for instructors was understanding how key events in the writing process related to time. Although timestamps were available, they were presented as isolated numbers, leaving instructors to mentally calculate when something happened by comparing total writing time, event timing, and the version in which it occurred. This added unnecessary cognitive effort, forcing instructors to reconstruct the writing story instead of being able to see it unfold.

To address this, I introduced a timeline that visually represents the progression of writing over time. Key events are placed along the timeline based on when they occurred, creating an immediate visual connection between actions and their timing. Instructors can play and replay the timeline to observe how the paper evolved, allowing them to understand the writing process as a continuous story rather than a set of disconnected data points.

The Redesigned Instructor Writing Report

Interactive Prototype

Inbox - A Clear Starting Point

Professor Greene is reviewing the inbox after students completed a 3-4 page essay that focuses on different species within the Mongoose family. She surveys the inbox and decides to quickly review Robert Pettigrew’s, because it has 2 flags, and she wants to learn more.

Screenshot 2025-10-07 at 3.03_edited.jpg

Key Details

Instructors clearly understand from their inbox which submissions might contain integrity issues through Flags and the expanded view.
Decision to keep only process related insights and not include Similarity and AI related insights as segregation of all the reports will be handled by a separate project

Writing Report

Professor Greene sees the final submission with a writing report and notices the two flags mentioned in the inbox: Writing process and Reliance on pasted text.

Key Details

Comprehension

Organized the data into a more structured format. Introduced Flags, Findings and Observations architecture
- Flags are triggered if certain noteworthy findings are discovered during the writing process
- Findings are calculated based on raw data as well as certain events that are captured during the writing process
- Observations are ALL the findings and events which are meaningful in itself when presented at the right place
Included copy that explains each finding and every number in an easy to understand language

Cohesiveness

Different portions of the report convey the same story irrespective from where you start interacting
Playback timeline to be always present as an integral portion of the report instead of it being shown as a part of version history or time spent
Playback timeline and the findings in the side panel work hand in hand. The instructor interacts with either of them to get the same result.

Flags

Flags surface potential integrity concerns within the context of student writing, helping you quickly identify where closer review may be needed.

Key Details

Writing process flags highlight unusual patterns in writing time or revision effort.

Writing Time
This finding indicates that the amount of time the student took to write this paper is much faster when compared to the length of the paper that was written
Shorter writing time than cohort
This finding indicates that the student spent less time writing this draft than other students in the class.
Minimal Revision
Professor Greene wants to know more about why the writing time was shorter, so she expands the Minimal revision finding and sees that the majority of the student’s work came from pasted text and from typed words, but very little of the student’s writing has been revised, which could be a sign that the student was typing content from an external source.
Reliance on Pasted text
Reliance on pasted text flags show how much a student relied on pasted content.
- Pasted text in final document
  This finding indicates that more than 50% of the final word count comes from pasted text.
- Significant pasting throughout the writing process
  This finding indicates that during the writing process the amount of words pasted by the student make up for more than 40% of the total words

Observations

The Observations tab helps you quickly understand how the student crafted their submission. It is a master list of all the events suspicious or not that happened during the writing process. Currently the type of events that are tracked are 'pasted text events' when the student pastes in a block of text. In future, events like continuous typing which could mean transcription will also be tracked.

Writing Process Information

This section provides an overview of writing metrics with details that summarize how a student developed their final document.

Total writing time reflects only the time the student actively engaged with the document through clicking or typing, not through passive actions like scrolling or idle time.
Number of writing sessions is number of times the student started and stopped activity in the document by entering and leaving the writing space or by becoming inactive for an extended period.

Pasted Text Findings

This section identifies moments when content was pasted into the document from outside of the writing space.

"This was really informative. I haven't seen anything like this report before where it can give you a lot of useful information. I thought it was quite fantastic. This would make the academic integrity hearings go a lot quicker if you can present this kind of irrefutable evidence."