My Roles: Project Manager, UX Designer/Researcher | Duration: 2 Weeks | Project Status: Complete
Project Overview
In this unit project, I worked with Ayanna House and Shikhar Mangla to help our client, The Millie Group, develop a product that would enable the schools in their Partner School Program to streamline their access to the Millie Group's offerings. This project was designed for us to partner with a client and utilize the skills we had learned throughout the course. Using the brief we received from our client, we worked as a team to define the project scope and deliverables; using our research insights, we created an online portal.
RESEARCH PHASE (Discover + Define)
Goal of Research
Our group’s hypothesis was that users are more likely to buy into partnering with the Millie Group and utilizing their services if they were more easily accessible.
Methodology
We conducted initial company research and began considering potential issues that users may encounter when searching for Millie's offerings. After reviewing the resources provided to us by our client we created a client interview discussion guide and a user interview discussion guide. After interviewing our client, we remotely conducted and recorded a total of 4 user interviews over the course of 7 days, after which we collaborated on creating an affinity map.
Affinity Mapping
Affinity Map for User Interviews
Through our findings from these interviews, we were able to gain the following insights:
Users don't like having to rely on email to receive or convey information about events
Users desire transparency when it comes to services offered based on their subscription plan with Millie Group
Users need to be reminded of events
Users prefer to be notified in advance about upcoming events
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
Competitive and Comparative Analyses (graphic design by Alia Hatch)
Our client informed us that their only competitor in the market was Crimson, so we conducted competitive analysis for the services they offered. Our client also informed us that some products and services that they were incorrectly considered competitors for included portal programs such as BridgeU, Blackboard, ManageBac, and Unifrog; we conducted comparative analysis to determine some of the features that could prove to be useful.
Persona
Meet Camille Counselor (graphic and presentation design by Alia Hatch)
Using the insights gleaned from our user interviews, we created Camille Counselor, a 45-year-old school counselor from London, UK who is interested in event planning and needs a faster, more efficient way to connect her students to career and university guidance resources. Camille is looking to supplement her knowledge to better assist students for university admissions and career guidance, but she's unable to provide personalized guidance to each student and has limited experience wen it comes to the application process for foreign universities.
Problem Statement & How Might We’s…
Following the creation of a journey map, the problem statement we arrived at was that Camille needs a centralized way to interact with Millie Group's events and digital resources so that she can better take advantage of the Partner School Program offerings.
By focusing on Camille’s needs, we focused on the following how might we’s:
How might we improve communication methods amongst the Millie Group, school administrators, and students? How might we increase the visibility of services offered based on their subscription plan? How might we increase the number of school partners utilizing Millie's services?
DESIGN PHASE (Design + Deliver)
Introducing the Millie Partner School Program Dashboard
Following our user interviews and our analysis of the services Millie Group offers to their partner schools, we began iterating on an online portal.
Design Studio: Sketching + Concepting
Sketches by Ayanna House, Shikar Mangla, and Alia Hatch (presentation and graphic design by Alia Hatch)
Mid-Fidelity Prototype Usability Testing
Mid-Fidelity Usability Testing Insights
Findings + Themes + Insights + Takeaways
Of the five participants we tested using our plan, our users had a total of 40 misclicks, and only one user didn't complete the first task:
Task #1 ("Create an account"): Even though we explained to the user that they were testing a prototype and that not everything would be functional, they were clicking with the attempt to manually enter text
The feedback we received during this round of usability testing helped us decide on design changes for the high-fidelity prototype iterations (to be detailed later).
High-Fidelity Desktop Prototype
High-Fidelity Desktop Prototype by Shikhar Mangla
Using our insights from the first round of usability testing, Shikhar Mangla created a high-fidelity prototype while I continued to synthesize the usability testing data.
High-Fidelity Usability Testing
Mid-Fidelity Usability Testing Insights
Findings + Themes + Insights + Takeaways
Using our updated plan, we increased the number of tasks to reflect the additions and changes made. Of the five participants we tested, only three successfully completed all five tasks. The most impactful error occurred during task #4:
Task #4 (Schedule an Intro to AI event for May 25th, 1:00 pm ET ): The users who made errors during this task didn't naturally navigate to the Calendar tab to complete this task. One user even commented on the wording of the task, stating that the wording of the instructions could’ve led to a culturally different understanding of the instruction
Final Design Iterations
Subject Element Feature (presentation and graphic design by Shikar Mangla)
For our final design iteration post-usability testing, we focused on the following updates:
Sidebar: added an option to add new teams belonging to the same school and invite new members to the existing team
Subject Element: added an option to hover over the informational icon on the subject element to help the user understand more about the topic; also gives the user the option to click "Learn More" to do a more detailed internet search
Selection Flow: added an option to make a selection of the element by highlighting it and clicking "Next" to move to the next page
For future iterations, we would consider adding student-specific access and features to the portal. We would also consider adding an integration feature that would allow school counselors to connect to the student platform of their choice (e.g., Google Classroom, ManageBac, Morrisby, or Unifrog).
Recommendations + Implementation + Next Steps
The following are our recommended next steps:
Targeted Marketing
Counselor Incentivization
Student Activity Tracking
Tiered Counselor Reward System
Comments