SchoolSphere
As a team of 4, we designed a user experience flow for rescheduling meetings between middle school teachers and parents as part of a business pitch for a seed company aiming at creating a school-related software, SchoolSphere, to liberate teachers from heavy daily administration tasks including teacher-parent communication.
Role
Timeline
Why is communication with parents taking up so much effort for teachers?
Work, Life, No Boundary...
Let’s pretend you are the teacher, Mr. Clyde. One of your students, Han, had a physical altercation during class a few days ago. According to the Law, you have to schedule a meeting with his parents...
1.
Clyde is a 5-year public high school teacher based in New York City.
2.
Clyde needs to contact Han’s mom regarding his recent behavior.
3.
Clyde tried to call during his prep period, the mom didn’t pick up. Clyde had to call after working hours.
4.
However, Han’s mom was driving, not able to pay attention and had to hang up quickly before Clyde finished.
5.
Clyde will have to follow up with another call, but has very little time on his plate and does not know when he will be able to do so.
6.
On top of that, Clyde needs to document all his contact attempts for administration purposes into the school’s system.
How might we make it more effortless for teachers to continuously follow up with parents?
Steady Steps We Took
Why is solving the above problem a good starting point for SchoolSphere?
It Bothers the Most!
We conducted 5 "bucketing" activities, where participants listed their daily tasks and then sorted them according to different criteria.
Among all tasks, parent-teacher communication stood out because:
4 out of 5 participants: it is #1 most frustrating
3 out of 5 participants: Among the top 2 most time-consuming
3 out of 5 participants: Among the top 2 most relevant to success as a teacher
Be the First to Fix This Major Pain Point for Teachers!
We conducted a study on the key features and user feedback of 7 major competitors and found that the asynchronized communication features between teachers and parents especially the meeting rescheduling feature has received major complaints. This directly leads to blurring of the boundaries between teachers' work and personal lives.
Iteration Through User Testing
Fixing Along Testing
Through 3 rounds of user testing with low-fi interactive prototype, we iterated based on UX metrics, task completion and subjective user feedback. We fixed problems including lack of feedback, duplicated efforts and confusing color coding through multiple rounds of iterations.
From Several Phone Calls to Several Clicks
Key Features of Our Solution
Every Action