Better School Choice
Building a more intuitive education platform
My objective for this assignment was to develop a research platform where parents can gather relevant information, compile lists, and determine next steps in order to discover private education options and eliminate the amount of time they spend finding the right school.
To accomplish this objective I set out to:
Identify the problem that users are looking to solve
Perform user and competitive research to find marketplace opportunities
Define and develop a solution to help address the user’s problem
User Persona
Help ease the research process
Spending on average the equivalent of a part- to full-time job researching schools, parents need a platform where they can minimize their research efforts and maximize making informed decisions about what private school fits their children’s educational needs.
Research & Decide:
Develop a platform to help users investigate and make decisions about school choices
To ease user’s pain, my goal was to create a platform where parents can:
Research: gather important information about schools
Manage information: create and add potential schools to lists
Make decisive next steps: perform in-depth research to narrow down options further
Track progress: receive updates, track visited schools and insert personal notes to help users in their final decision making process
Industry resources proved lacking in research adequacy
Research revealed a more robust research platform, centered around discovery and decision making, was needed.
User Interviews
User Interviews revealed that parents were:
Frustrated due to inadequate research options and a time-consuming process.
Made decisions about private schools due to feedback and ultimately from visiting and see their child’s comfortability level.
Competitive Research
Competitive Research revealed that while multiple research platforms are available:
The amount of information varied: some too much, others too little.
All but one lacked an site-provided organization feature.
School contact and next step information was limited.
Dating app meets school research
Pulling from the dating app concept, I wanted users (parents) to be able to move quickly through the search process by inputing a series preferences to generate a continuous search window.
To ease “getting to know” a school, users would be able to gather information and make definitive decisions and take next steps:
Using bulleted information to make quick yes/no’s
Create lists out of potential options and return over a period of time
Discover through unfolding collapsed sections of information
A platform where users can make informed decisions about private schooling
To create ease, I’ve created an all-inclusive platform where users will be able to research, manage and organize potential options and determine next steps to make informed decisions about picking a private school.
Next Steps
Continue to explore varying ways to show browsing results, like building out a card view, and build out user profile and onboarding screens.
Lessons Learned:
By doing more rounds of ideation, brainstorming and user testing, I’d be able to flushing out UI patterns, interaction states and task flows to help refine what functionalities users are accustomed and allow for the discovery of content that can create delight to encourage user engagement.
