Better School Choice

My role

For this project, I worked alone on the:

  • UX Research process - surveys, interviews, and competitive analysis

  • Ideation - Sketching, Problem Statement and How Might We’s (HMWs)

  • Usability Testing - Data Synthesis

  • Design System

Timeline

Two weeks - Sprint

Tools

  • Figma - prototyping, wireframing, design system

  • Google - Sheets, Docs

  • Figjam - user flows

 This app was designed to help parents make the best choice when it comes to sending their child(ren) to school

and for the business to understand how parents decide where to send their children to school.

 

Overall Goals

 

 I read through 6 lengthy interviews and compiled significant insights from each of them. Below are the main offerings and/or functionalities that parents valued while searching for schools for their children to attend. 

What’s Important to Parents in the School Search?

 
 

Based on those insights, I formulated a general problem statement along with a few how might we’s to support it.

 

Problem Statement

 

Parents need an efficient tool to help them decide where to send their children to a school that aligns with their values/beliefs, in order to reduce the amount of stress that goes into the school search process.

 

Meet the target user. This is the persona we developed to better empathize with our user and their problems and goals. 

 

Persona

 
 

Next, after creating a user flow and mid-fidelity prototype, I created a few potential scenarios and tasks that the target audience might complete on the app and recruited users from our cohort. Here is the primary task of booking a school tour.

 

Primary Task: Booking a Tour

After selecting the most important features from both analyses, my team held a Design Studio where we worked on designing new screens of the Migraine Buddy app and converged on the most effective designs.

Iterations - Move the CTA further up

Next, for the iterations from mid-fi to hi-fi, this user expressed that “having the book a tour button might be more helpful if it was on the top versus if it was all the way down at the bottom.”  

I moved the CTA to the top and made it longer, bringing it more attention, and allowing the user to book the tour without having to scroll to the bottom if unnecessary.

 
 
 

Move the “Book a Tour” CTA to the top of the screen

“having the book a tour button might be more helpful if it was on the top versus if it was all the way down at the bottom.” 

 
 

Iterations (continued) - Add a search function

 
 
 

Next, another user wondered if “there was a way to search schools with a magnifying glass tool?”

As a part of my assumption, I thought it was unnecessary for users to have a search function for the MVP without realizing that some users probably couldn’t function without it. Sometimes it’s unnecessary but in this case, it was needed.

So I added a search function.

Iterations (continued) - Reduce cognitive load

 
 
 

Finally, This user expressed that maybe on the school information page, there are other details that parents may want to read, and they may be overwhelmed by the continuous scroll.

So, I added a see more link to certain areas of the page that would allow it to expand if necessary. 

“I wonder if on the school detail page maybe there are other information that typical parents would want to read, if we include all that information, it would be a really long vertical scroll to go through.” 

 

Average Results for Booking a Tour

 

On average, to complete the task of booking a tour, it took the 3 participants 56 seconds with 9 clicks and 4 errors

Positive Insights

Here are a few positive insights from the participants in regards to the interface and the flow of the app.

  • Most people expressed that the flow was pretty seamless and that it reminded them of typical appointment booking. 

  • They also appreciated the simplicity of the flow in terms of spacing and text

Next Steps

  • Conduct a new round of usability tests on the hi fidelity mockup

  • Test on participants from the target audience (trial)

  • Conduct another audit on the language used for the headings on the app

Takeaways

  • It was more intuitive to move the “Book a Tour” CTA from the bottom to the top of the screen

  • Users appreciated the virtual tour option due to current times. (Covid-19)

  • The logo did not need to be present on all of the screens, especially those that contained huge amounts of information

  • Although this app was an MVP, users still needed to be able to search for a school with a search function to give them options

  • Users may not need a confirmation screen before choosing to modify their reservation, only after