Tutor·ed | 2023 | Best Project award | UX/UI Design Bootcamp Ironhack | Mobile
An app designed to help families find the right tutor for their children, attending their needs and personality. Tutor·ed will not only help them create a personalized learning plan, but also monitor the student's progress through regular reports.
Duration: 14 days (Mar 23) Project type: Product Design Tools: Figma & Photoshop Team: Individual Project
Overview
Introduction
Tutor·ed is the final project I completed for the UX/UI Design Bootcamp at Ironhack. It was selected as the best project of the bootcamp.
I was given complete freedom to choose the topic I wanted to focus on, so I did a first general research where I found big gaps in the Spanish school-aged population experience regarding private tutoring.
Problem Statement
Families with school-age children (elementary, middle and high school) have experienced increasing needs of additional school support and face difficulties finding the right person to teach them and monitor the evolution of their children through regular reports.
Discover
Desk Research
Over the last years, Spanish private tutoring market has experienced a strong growth. Half of the school population needs support teachers’ after their classes in order to catch up with their lessons. This is a big investment for Spanish families.
During the year 2019-2020, additional expense per family in education totalled €751. This amount has tripled in the last 10 years. At the same time, public investment in this field has decreased 70%.
Interviews & Surveys
After the first insights gained from the Desk Research, I had the opportunity to carry out more than 180 surveys and interviews to help me gather a deeper understanding of the most pressing needs and issues families with school-aged children are facing.
"Guerrilla" interviews
When starting the Strategy Blueprint, I conducted a “guerrilla” interview with 10 people in order to understand how families would like to receive reports or data of their children's academic evolution. 90% of them regretted not having an app with all their children's school information and believed this format would be more useful and handy than their current student portal.
Competitive Analysis
I conducted a competitive analysis to identify competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, this tool was really useful to understand how I could differentiate my app creating a unique value proposition.
Key insights I gained from these tools:
- All of the interviewed people required private tutoring for at least one of their children because education provided by their school was not enough.
- Parents do appreciate receiving feedback after their children private classes in order to have a better understanding of their evolution.
- There is a lack of digital alternatives giving the possibility of finding the best tutor according to the student personality.
- None of the apps or websites give feedback or any kind of report of the student progress.
Define
Affinity Diagram
To summarize the research phase, I synthesized all gathered information into an analysis to identify themes, opportunities, and features that Tutor·ed could improve. The main themes were: time that parents spend with their children, online-class methodology, tutoring style, lack of follow-up, where to look for teachers, reasons for hiring private tutoring and frequency of the classes.
Strategy Blueprint
I defined a Strategy Blueprint which was used as a roadmap of the project and evolved during all the user experience phases. It was the main tool used to define the scope of the project. By following and editing this document, I could enhance the user journey and define the real needs that users have.
USER PERSONA
I defined 2 user persona, people that could accurately represent the key characteristics, needs and frustrations of the target audience. María became my main focus to design the user journey.
USER JOURNEY
I created a journey outlining the different steps the user would experience in a specific context and I was able to identify the main pain points and obstacles in order to create solutions.
Key Insights I gained from this tool:
- “Matching profiles”: the app will match teacher and student by simple mutual interest and personality making sure they get along with each other.
- A specialized plan for each student: both parents and teachers will establish goals and objectives for each student matching their time and needs.
- Periodic report: in order to help parents having a better understanding of their children’s evolution, teachers will give feedback after each class.
Ideate
BRAINSTORMING, MOSCOW, IMPACT&EFFORT MATRIX
To kick-off the design process, I used these techniques to think about different possibilities and features that could be implemented in the app. Thanks to the brainstorming, I came up with many different ideas. Later on, I used the Moscow Method in order to screen the main features my app would have and the Impact&Effort matrix was essential to prioritize them.
USER STORIES & USER FLOW
For the next step, I wrote down a list of 12 user stories that helped me define the user flow. This diagram showed the different screens and main features of the app, as well as the user’s actions and decisions taken in every step of the process. This tool was very helpful to see how the user would move through the app and interact with it.
Flow:
A registered user checks her son's report and creates a new profile to her daughter to llok for a physics teacher.
Key insights I gained from these tools:
- Time management: I had to find balance between time and effort in order to get the best solution with the time set.
- Added value: the critical point was being able to show the added value my app had to the users.
- Data visualization: essential and a must-have for good/clear understanding.
Prototype
CRAZY 8 & LO-FI PROTOTYPE
Continuing with the design process and to start wireframing, I developed the initial Lo-fi prototype based on the user flow and using the Crazy 8 technique. Based on these first sketches, I created a Lo-fi prototype using Figma instead of drawing it on paper.
MID-FI PROTOTYPE + TESTING
With the first Lo-fi wireframes I conducted user testing, which helped me iterate on the solution based on the feedback to develop a Mid-fi prototype.
Key changes:
Cards: in order to show the information in a more clear way, I decided to create cards containing the related information.
Search: the search field from the navigation bar was not essential, we can get to the teacher finder through the “+” floating button.
MOODBOARD & DESIGN SYSTEM
After working on the moodboard and looking for the aesthetics of Tutor·ed, I created a style guide to start working on the final solution for the project. As I needed to have a very clear app, but at the same time Tutor·ed cointained a lot of information, I focused on designing cards in order to group all the important information and searched for references of existing apps such as Apple Health (dashboard) and AirBnB (information sorting).
Key insights:
Colorful and bright: the app has a lot of information, we will use colour to identify the different elements and make it more attractive.
Cards: cards will be a very important part of the design system, creating differences based on size and information contained.
HI-FI PROTOTYPE
To test the UI and improve the user experience of the app, I created a high-fidelity prototype based on all the feedback gathered and developed on the previous steps of the design process.
NEXT STEPS
- Premium account for teachers: different training and evaluations will help them get a better positioning on the app search engine.
- Teacher version: creating the other side of the app.
- Rewards: loyalty program when funneling new users to the app.
- Surveys: test and satisfaction surveys to both teachers and students.
Conclusion
WHAT DID I LEARN?
This project proved very challenging because I had to learn new skills at the same time I did all the UX/UI research and design.
The first pain point I experienced was redefining my Problem Statement after conducting a deeper research. With the first Desk Research, I concluded that parents do not have enough time to help their children with homework, but it was later on, after conducting surveys and interviews, that I found out they prefer spending their time doing other things and hire professional services to help them with private tutoring.
This assignment was a fantastic opportunity for me to decide which of the learned tools would help me more depending on the stage of the project.
After 8 weeks working crazy hours non-stop, and before starting the UI, I was feeling really tired and insecure. Fortunately, I had the support of an amazing group of mentors by my side. This support motivated me to finish strong, and my project was shortlisted as one of the two best of the bootcamp.
