Turnitin Clarity
OVERVIEW
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. This helps the educators to assess the student work for academic integrity and originality.
ROLE AND DURATION
Product Designer (co-lead) the Instructor Report Design
IA, Interaction Design, Usability testing prototypes, High-Fidelity UI, Responsive designs, Accessibility Annotations, Engineering hand off
November 2024 - August 2025
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.
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
Working within a three-week sprint framework, I focused on design decisions that directly addressed the core challenges instructors faced in interpreting writing process data. Each sprint helped refine how the experience could better support understanding, investigation, and narrative coherence.
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, 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.
Together, these design decisions reshaped how instructors move through the report , from first impression to deep investigation.
The Redesigned Instructor Writing Report
In the redesigned report, the experience shifts from overwhelming data to meaningful insight. Instructors begin with context that clearly indicates why a submission is flagged and what they should expect, reducing uncertainty and providing a confident start. Once inside, structured categories and hierarchy help educators navigate findings with confidence. Broad signals and insights appear first, with supporting evidence available on demand, enabling instructors to investigate systematically rather than piecing together fragmented information.
Entering the Report with Context and Confidence
Instructors can now clearly understand which submissions should be looked at first based on what submissions have been flagged and why. A preview of flagged writing-process events gives instructors a clear idea of what to expect as they open the detailed report, reducing uncertainty and helping them begin with confidence. This reduces their anxiety from where to begin and gives them a clear and a confident start.
Navigating Insight, Evidence and Details
Instead of deciphering dense numbers, instructors can flow from big-picture insights to specific evidence with context and cohesiveness intact, reducing cognitive load and decision friction. This structured flow is supported by components like Flags and Observations, which surface key integrity signals and writing events within a consistent investigative path.With insights and evidence connected, instructors no longer jump between disconnected panels. Instead, they follow a guided path from high-level understanding to necessary detail.
Flags
Flags help instructors quickly understand where closer review may be needed and why. Instead of scanning dense metrics, instructors are presented with concise indicators that point to specific moments in the writing process that warrant attention. This allows them to prioritize investigation based on meaningful signals rather than raw numbers.
By default, Flags remain collapsed to avoid overwhelming the instructor, while still communicating the nature of the concern. When expanded, they reveal supporting details that help instructors interpret what happened and decide whether further exploration is necessary. This balance supports quick scanning when time is limited, while still enabling deeper investigation when needed.
Observations
Observations help instructors see how a student’s writing developed over time by presenting key writing events in sequence. Instructors can understand patterns of behavior, such as when large portions of text were introduced, and how those moments fit into the overall writing journey.
This sequential view supports interpretation rather than judgment in isolation. By seeing when and how content was added, instructors gain context that helps distinguish between natural drafting, revision, and potential integrity concerns. As additional event types such as generative-AI use and transcription are incorporated, Observations will continue to provide a more complete picture of how students compose their work.
Understanding process through timeline
The timeline makes the writing journey intelligible at a glance, instead of requiring manual reconstruction. Instructors can easily map the sequence of events on it and can choose to deep dive into a particular event as needed. They can begin interacting with the report either through timeline, or from the Flags / Observations in the side panel and they will always have a cohesive experience.
With the redesigned Writing Report, instructors can now move from uncertainty to understanding with far less cognitive effort. Instead of interpreting disconnected signals, they are guided through clear insights, contextual evidence, and a visual narrative of the writing process. This enables instructors to identify meaningful concerns more quickly, understand how a submission evolved, and focus their time on pedagogical decisions rather than interface interpretation. In high-stakes situations involving academic integrity, this clarity supports fairer, more confident conversations with students.
Early instructor feedback reinforced the value of this approach:
"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."
Interactive Prototype
For those who want to explore the flow in more detail, the interactive prototype below demonstrates how the redesigned report behaves in practice.
Responsive Design: Preserving Clarity Across Screen Sizes
We found that instructors work across multiple devices, ranging from extra large desktops at the university / school, their personal desktops and laptops, tablets and sometimes on their mobile phones. As the screen size reduces, the real estate becomes premium. It becomes important to decide what features . Along with that, the interaction patterns either remain the same as bigger screens or need to adapted for smaller sizes based on the best practices and principles out there.
It is important to retain the important functionalities of the instructor report across those devices.
Class size - Extra Large - 1600+dp
Desktop, Ultra-wide monitors
Class size - Expanded - 840 dp -1199 dp
Class size - Medium - 768 dp -1024 dp
Tablet in portrait, Phone in landscape
Instructor Report prototype on mobile
Solve for large number of findings on the timeline
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Annotate for Accessibility
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Design User Onboarding
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Fast follow - AI detection for pasted text
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