PROJECT INFO
This was an end-to-end design project that covers user research, design, testing, and iteration. It was a solo student project for Springboard UX/UI Bootcamp.
👩🏻💻 MY ROLE
• UX research
• UX/UI design
🕛 TIMELINE
• 16 weeks
⭐️ FEATURE
• Support bilingual users
• Designed by a teacher
THE CHALLENGE
Parents feel overwhelmed with the amount of school information received
As a former classroom teacher, I often heard parents complaining about the amount of paperwork and emails they have to deal with each week from school. It is quite common that parents to miss important school events due to information overload. The existing parent-school communication system fails to meet the needs of busy parents.
PROJECT GOALS
Reconnect with parents
The lack of a cohesive and easy-to-manage system creates a huge hurdle for parents to stay engaged in their kids’ school life.
To improve this situation, this project aims to:
• decrease the amount of work parents have to do to stay organized with school information
• reconnect parents with their kids’ schools life
SOLUTION AT A GLANCE
School information organized automatically
Design process
SECONDARY RESEARCH
The problem is common!
Parents spend about 1-3 hours (per kid) weekly managing school emails and paperwork.
Weekly school materials include:
• 15-20 school forms
• 5-10 emails
PRIMARY RESEARCH
Conversation with real parents
In order to learn more about this issue from the parents’ perspectives and get their insights, I recruited 5 parents for five 30-min virtual interviews. Here was the summary of the feedback:
The existing system is too complex and messy.
The biggest struggle parents face is the complex communication system different schools use.
Parents don’t have enough time.
Parents want to do less work on organization and save time for other important things.
Information is hard to track back and often gets lost.
Parents want to get more engaged with their kids’ school life, however, in reality, if it’s too hard to find information, they give up.
BUILDING A PERSONA
Design with parents in mind
With all the insights from the secondary and primary research, I created a persona that best represented the potential users.
IDEATE
Initial plan
In the initial ideation process, I came up with the file/data organization and storage idea. The plan was to have parents scan/store/categorize different sources of information in one place.
However, I was NOT completely satisfied with the solution for the following reasons:
• Although I fixed the problem of having information in one place, it was still a lot of work to stay organized!
• It was still a ONE-WAY system so the communication piece was missing.
“Keep asking myself the WHY questions until I find the core issue!”
The light bulb moment & new direction!
Wait a minute! What if parents don’t even need to organize the information at all? The information can be presented in an organized way so all it is left for parents to do is to look for information that they need when they need it?”
With this new idea in mind, I’ve decided to reiterate and go with a different approach. Instead of having parents document and store all sources of information, we had the school present the information in a unified portal.
GUERILLA USABILITY TEST
During the iteration process, I conducted a few tests of my sketches and low-fidelity mockups through guerrilla usability tests.
Version 1
Four parents tested version 1. Three of the testers mentioned that the main page is a little overwhelming. They wanted to browse important information in one glance. Additionally, the event was organized by children’s names. A few mentioned that they prefer that it’s organized by time and changed to a calendar view.
Version 2
Three parents tested version 2. All the testers liked the new homepage layout and the event calendar view. They suggested that the message and event pages should both add a search bar for quick message and event search.
High fidelity Version
PROTOTYPE & TEST
Final touches
I’ve conducted two rounds of remote usability tests to improve the prototypes. During the process, I’ve made 3 changes to solve the issues listed below.
FINAL DESIGN
LEAVING THOUGHTS
OUTCOME
To recap from the beginning, the goals of this project are to:
✅ decrease the number of work parents have to do to stay organized with school information
✅ reconnect parents with their kids’ schools life
I asked my participants the following question:
On a scale of 1-5, how confident are you that the app will improve your school communication?
Almost all participants rated 5. They felt more organized and relaxed and were more willing to participate in school activities.
AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT
In this project, I have kept the design minimal. However, there are definitely more ideas that can be explored in the future. For example, in the current product, there’s no area for parents to share and communicate with one another. If you have any good ideas about this project, please feel free to contact me.