Selecting schools for success
Kids often fall behind in public schools, which causes parents to turn to private schools to meet their children’s needs.
Selecting the right school is very important for a child’s educational, social, and personal development.
Parents are focused on helping their children to thrive. The goal of this project is to
help parents by creating an app that:
Provides relevant information
Creates methods of organization
Focuses their child’s needs
Overview
As a product design student at Flatiron School, I was assigned to complete a digital experience that guided me through the entire UX process.
In this project, I was working for a conceptual client who provided a brief of the project, which included research data. The outcome of this research supported the launch of a new product that helps parents make the best choice when deciding where to send their kids to school.
My role
I was the product designer responsible for synthesizing research data, and identifying problems to solve; exploring various solutions; creating user flows and usability tests; creating prototypes.
Defining the problem
My initial research data consisted of six interview transcripts with parents who had experienced the school selection process. What factors do they care about?
To better understand the user, I took note of important information from the interviews and grouped them into an affinity diagram and empathy map.
User research takeaways
of parents said their child was struggling in public schools.
described the process as fragmented and time-consuming.
said touring the school was the main factor in making their decision.
A fragmented process
There is a large amount of information and different search options, making it hard to organize findings.
As I synthesized my interview insights, I organized them into themes to help me focus on the most impactful points. The top themes were:
A gut feeling
A consistent finding across all interviews was the decisive role that school tours played in parents' final decisions. The emotional experience during these tours, weighed more heavily on the decision than the specific features offered by the schools.
Parents feel reassured when their kids are in an environment that suits their personalities and encourages their strengths.
Problem statement
A key challenge for parents of school-aged children is to find a school that matches their criteria while making sure the school aligns with their own values. How might we simplify the school search process while also providing parents with the confidence that they're making the best decision for their children?
Prioritizing features
I performed market research as my starting point, to identify what resources are available to parents. Based on a SWOT analysis of the competitors, and my understanding of the user, I created a list of possible features that could help parents. That way, I was able to split those features into a priority matrix and find the most critical ones.
Initial design exploration
I created five user stories to frame what parents are trying to accomplish and stay consistent with the problem statement. With the features in mind, I began ideating them into exploratory sketches, with a few rounds of the Crazy 8’s.
My best screen ideas were turned into a user flow diagram.
Learning through testing