Bringing parents and educators together with Click Learning Co.
The Company
Click Learning company is a for-profit tutor matching service that matches students with tutors based upon common interests with the goal that by making their lessons more relatable, the lessons taught will be more retained by the student.
they are currently in the early stages of their beta testing and asked for my team of 5 to take a look at their existing website to identify what needs their current design is lacking.
Their problem
Essentially, to break it down to a Too long, Didn’t Read- they had a lot of issues and were limited in their understanding of what users needed.
We saw that click learning’s existing website was largely non-functional.
Basic information was hidden behind “log-in” screens.
There was no feature that explained how click matched children with tutors.
There was no portal page where users could track their child’s progress, manage their tutoring booking sessions, message instructors, etc.
My Role
How We Solved their problems
Final homepage
jump ahead to:
By conducting user interviews of click users and users of their competition, we identified 4 major user needs that we had to address:
we created a parent portal, where users could track their learners progress, find new tutors, manage payments, and message tutors.
we redesigned the homepage to more explicitly explain what differentiates click learning from their competitors.
We created a user flow to create profiles for their learners that emphasized the matching aspect. Parents would fill out a questionnaire regarding students interests, learning style, and subject they needed help with.
We increased accessibility for all users. we improved language used, edited visuals to more clearly assist in supporting the text, made navigation more identifiable and easier to use, and improved navigation to be more intuitive.
Overall, we made the ability to process information easier for users. our testing results showed an improvement of users understanding of click learning’s navigation and click learnings purpose with 5/5 users tested remarked on ease of use and ease of comprehension.
My role in this project was one of a researcher role. along with several teammates, i wrote interview questions, recruited participants, performed interviews & usability testing.
step 2 of learner quiz
step 3 of learner quiz
step 1 of learner quiz
Portal landing screen
First step of learner quiz determining interests and what they need help with
Our next steps would be….
to broaden the scope of people interviewed. We missed some demographics for users. groups like older students, very young parents, parents of asian descent, among many others were noticeably missing from our sample pool.
design a method for parents to receive feedback in visual as well as written ways.
Develop the ability to see tutor availability on a calendar and at a glance.
continue to work on mobile versions.
Research
We began our project with several important decisions to make.
A classmate and I focused on doing comparative analysis of click learning and their competition.
We learned Click Learnings unique strength: the tutor matching feature that click offered.
We asked ourselves “how can we utilize click learnings unique feature to meet parent needs?
To identify parents needs, we decided to speak to…..parents.
we recruited 6 parents who used click learning or other online tutoring services and conducted interviews with them.
our affinity map- each theme has an “i need” statement above it
By looking for trends in user responses, we were able to create “i need…” statements which clearly stated what the user need was.
we found parents had 3 major needs
seeing their childs grades improve.
finding a way to make tutoring benefit their child as much as possible.
being able to feel comfortable knowing they found the best available tutor to their child.
using these needs, we asked ourselves how we might solve these goals for one person, who would be a representative of everyone. We broke each statement from each user down to its bare essentials, I would look at each statement and ask myself “What are they really saying is the issue at its core?”
While We toiled in our workshop, creating a magnificent beast of perfection, We looked for trends the group had all found and used them to create our user persona:
meet nicole
My role in this project ended here, I fulfilled my purposes as a researcher and the group used the data I and others had collected to design features to help Nicole and fill Click Learnings goal.
We had to split up our work amongst the 7 of us. I volunteered to focus on the parent portal aspect of the design.
I got very lucky with my interviewee. She was a single mother of an adopted child who had spent a lot of time researching various online tutoring services.
our metrics category and corresponding “i need statement”
growth category with corresponding “i need” statement
Nicole is a representation of the users we interviewed. She is:
Single mother, sole provider.
Concerned about her childs grades first and foremost.
Wants to communicate with the tutor on her own schedule.