UX Case study

I’ve done this project as an intern in a company developing software for childcare centres.

Working on delivered user interviews, I conducted research and proposed solutions for a communication tool for educators and parents, as a new feature for existing app. In this case study I focused on educators’ aspects and their needs in communication with parents.

Problem

• Complicated communication between parents and educators.

Purpose

• Find out needs and define pain points.

• Propose solution.

Users’ need and struggles

During analyzing already done interviews, I have found plenty of needs and pain points, which I categorized in the Affinity Map. Creating groups of pains and requirements clearly showed me the areas I should focus on, like communication or notifications. I have also discovered one intriguing and challenging insight when educators say they need quick and direct contact with parents. But they do not want to be overwhelmed by parents contacting them.

The next step was creating the Customer Journey Map to put all pains and needs in a timeline with a scenario. I knew the problem is with incoming and outcoming messages. So I created journey maps with two scenarios: The parent sending a message and the educator contacting the parent. It was crucial activity because perspectives are too diverse, and pain points are in different steps.

In competitor analysis, I focused on communication tools already used by users to find their strong and weak sides. Also, during studying interviews, I understood that to improve educators' work it could be crucial to create a proper contact form for parents. I found some inspiration in the support chat from the banking app when the user needs to choose the topic of the issue before sending a message. That could define how urgent the message is.

All those research activities led me to the most crucial pain points and areas that need work. That allowed me to create a communication tool suited to educators’ needs and the childcare center environment.

Pain Points

📌 It's hard to provide direct and organised communication between parents and educators.

📌 Educators have to rely on different, external communicators.

📌 Educators get too many notifications.

📌 Incoming messages aren't categorised / prioritised.

📌 Lack of flexible solutions to respond messages.

Crucial areas to work on

• Organised communication tool for educators.

• Notifications and categorisation in educators’ communicator.

• Contact form for parents.

Hypothesis

• If an educator has communicator in the app then they can directly contact with parents and keep conversations in one place.

• If an educator gets message with tags how urgent a message is then they can prioritise their response.

• If an educator has an option to respond to a group then they can easily share messages, announcements in a fast way.

• If an educator see categorised messages then they can easily manage notifications and feel less overwhelmed.

Low fidelity wireframes

Next steps

• Testing

• Iteration

• Propose solution of contact form for parent.

What I've learnt

This has been challenging and very enriching experience. I faced real user problem, learn analysing interview data, how to conduct further research and practiced research methods like Affinity Map, Customer Journey Map or Competitor Analysis.

Biggest challenge I faced during this project was creating Information Architecture. It was new for me and following the steps of UX courses, first should be Information Architecture and then wireframing. In this case it didn't worked, I was blocked. To move on, I decided to start making basic drawings and low fidelity wireframes to visualise my thoughts and ideas. That helped me to move on, and create my very first basic Information architecture. Another good method to go through this blocker would be card sorting.