Helping parents find the best schools for their kids.
This case study was a 3 week sprint focused on researching and improving the experience parents have when searching for schools for their children. This was a student project while at the Flatiron School and includes research/discovery, UX, and UI.
Lead UX/UI Designer
Figma
Google Forms
Research Guide, Affinity Map, Problem Statement, Mid-Fi Concept, User Flow Diagram, User Test Plan, UX Evaluation Report, Moodboard, Style Tile, Hi-Fi Interactive Prototype
December 12 2022- January 6 2023 with a week off in between for the holidays.
The goal of this project was to develop a deeper understanding of how parents decide where their children enroll in school. With that knowledge I would then design a user flow to give parents an easier experience doing so. My classmates and I were given a brief from a mock client that provided several transcripts of interviews already recorded as well as a list of types of data they thought were worth exploring. The data types include:
I collaborated with several UX Designer colleagues that were working on similar projects to develop a set of semi structured interview questions and a survey. The survey would provide quantitative data on the search process and the interview’s open ended nature would pave the way for discovery. Alongside that, a competitive analysis was conducted to see what kinds of products are already out there helping parents. My colleagues and I decided that all participants in our studies must be parents of school aged children. I interviewed three parents and 10 parents took the survey.
I found the interviews to be very fruitful as parents love to talk about their children and gave me tons of information. An affinity map was created to synthesize new insights from the interviews I conducted along with the transcripts provided in the initial brief. Below are key insights drawn from the affinity map as well as a quote from one of the interviewees:
“I’d love to not spend so much time researching schools.” - interviewee 1.
I want my children to try as many things as possible.
I want my kids to go to a school with a type of curriculum I believe in.
I want my kids to have a high quality education that I can afford.
Using the insights gained from research, I had identified a core problem that would provide value to parents if we were able to solve it. I crafted a problem statement to give that problem context and provide something I could ideate around and compare solutions to:
Parents who are in the planning process of enrolling children in school need a digital tool to find and filter schools that meet their desired criteria (cost, types of programs, and class sizes) in order to pick a school that will best fit their family’s needs.
Now that I had a problem statement it was time to figure out what features would be most useful to solve the issue at hand. After coming up with a list of feature options through rapid ideation sketching, the MoSCoW method was used to rank their priorities. The MoSCoW method revealed that the must have features were:
When I was rapid sketching and ideating, I found myself to be inspired by the Harry Potter saga and more specifically the “Sorting Hat” in that the user is immediately placed upon starting their experience. This led me to design a user flow around a quiz that would filter and sort through schools based on the user’s answers.
I designed a user flow diagram with a task scenario of “Find a K-12 school by taking the School Sorting Quiz then picking/favoriting one of the schools in the results.” Being able to view the diagram allowed me to figure out the amount of steps the user would take to reach the goal and identify any hurdles that would create longer routes to get there.
The usability test was done remotely with 4 participants who are all parents of school aged children. The session included a short briefing of the app before completing the task scenario, “Find a K-12 school by taking the School Sorting Quiz then picking/favoriting one of the schools in the results “, on a mid fidelity prototype. They were encouraged to think out loud about their thought process during the task scenario and I asked them my research questions afterward. The sessions took about 10-15 minutes each.
The users had a lot of feedback. While there was a general consensus of the quiz being useful in theory, several iterations would be crucial to improve the user experience.
Several parents I talked to brought up the importance of their children spending time outside. That immediately drew me in towards earthy tones and the familiar, warm, and inviting feelings that come with them. I landed on a cream color for a background, a charcoal for text, and forest green for CTAs to further emulate the earthy feel.
From there I wanted a type hierarchy that matched it. With a color scheme and project adjectives in line, music was the road I would turn down next to find a font. In my ideation process, quickly I came across the legendary album by The Beach Boys, “Pet Sounds” which featured Fraunces as the font and a similar shade of green for the cover. Fraunces became the header font and “Plus Jakarta Sans” felt like an obvious clean choice for the body copy in keeping the interface balanced.
With a font hierarchy, an updated user flow based off evaluation, and a color scheme, I converged into a hi-fi concept.
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Did Schoogle solve the issue? With extensive filtering and an easy to use flow, it allows parents to quickly find schools that best fit their children. I look forward to conducting more user testing on this hi-fi concept to iterate and improve this product further.
