Better School Choice
Allowing parents to find, save, & compare schools, with ease.
My Role: UX/UI Design
The Problem
Every parent wants the best for their child, and this includes what school they attend. For many parents, the process of choosing where to send their children to school can be confusing and overwhelming. The volume of considerations parents have to make before making a decision is enough to add stress to a parents life.
Project Goals
The goal for this project was to create a product that encapsulates the basic needs of a parents/guardians looking to send their child to school, presented clean and simply. The product should allow parents/guardians to easily find, save, and compare schools near them.
Research
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Define
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Ideate
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Test
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Iterate
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Research 〰️ Define 〰️ Ideate 〰️ Test 〰️ Iterate 〰️
Research
Parents/guardians looking to send their child to a new school need a resource to find and filter through schools based on their individual needs, in order to make a well-informed decision.
Upon reviewing interview transcripts sourced from Ourkids.org, we found that each parent/guardian had the same goals, even if they had different needs. They wanted to send their children to a school that they would thrive in, that also fits into their logistical needs. They needed a tool that would assist them in obtaining important information about schools, in order to make a well-informed decision.
Who are we designing for?
Parents and guardians all over the country will benefit from solving this problem. The target audience is parents and guardians who are actively looking for a school for their child.
Niche, Common App, InsideSchools.org: Strengths and Weaknesses
A competitive analysis was performed on multiple direct and indirect competitors. This was done using a SWOT analysis to determine the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of each product, and get a more refined idea of the competitive landscape.
What products already exist?
Synthesis
Prioritizing emotional decision-making
Upon completing an affinity map for the interview transcripts, we noticed all parents had one thing in common: they ultimately chose a school based on a gut feeling. Once the parents had sourced all of their important information, they chose a school that “just felt right.”
Narrowing insights further
Insights from the affinity map were pulled and further analyzed to empathize with prospective users. Insights were sorted to gain understanding of the user’s potential influences, pain points, tasks, feelings, and goals. This information was then used to assist in the feature prioritization process. Potential features were brainstormed with this information in mind. Potential features should be ideated with the user in mind…how can we add a feature that makes accomplishing their tasks easier? How can we accommodate and ease user pain points? How can we take the user’s feelings and influences in accomplishing their goals in to consideration?
Completing market research, and research synthesis and provided us with a great opportunity to pull out features that should be prioritized for our product. Using the empathy map to keep user’s at the forefront of the ideation, potential features were brainstormed. Using the MosCow method, we grouped features in to status of priority, to organize and plan for the initial launch and future launches. The MosCow method provides a good framework for weighing importance of features against constraints such as time and technology.
Ideation
Designing for a gut decision: Wireframing & low-fidelity prototyping
The main theme pulled out from the interviews was that parents ultimately went with a gut feeling when choosing a school. How do you design for a gut feeling? This led us to our approach for the initial launch: Provide parents the tools and features they need in a clean, organized way, that way their gut decision will be a well-informed one.
I then did multiple rounds of ideative sketching, wireframing, and created a
Testing & Iteration
Usability tests were performed using the low-fidelity prototypes, to identify strengths and weakness of the flow, hierarchy, and layout of information. Upon testing, designs were updated and created in a higher fidelity, to account for the findings.
