Private School Locator

Private School Locator Mobile App

Timeframe:
10 days

Tools and Team:
Figma
NounProject
Individual Project

Key Deliverables:
Empathy Map
User Flow Diagram
Mid-Fidelity Prototype

My Role:
UX Researcher
UX Designer

Background

Mid-fidelity prototype

Picking the right school for your child can be a difficult task for some parents. Having an app that has information about all private schools in one place could be really helpful.
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I created a design for an app that makes it easier for parents to choose a new private school for their children. I synthesized the research into an empathy map to understand the user’s feelings and experience throughout their process. This helped me eventually create a user flow and finally a mid-fidelity prototype.

Objective and Challenge

My challenge was to help the client understand how parents decide where to send their children to school. By analyzing and synthesizing research I was able to support the launch of a new app that helps parents make choosing a private school for their children an easier process.

Empathize with Research

I utilized six user interview transcripts from conversations with parents looking for private schools for their children. Throughout the interviews the parents shared their process and their guiding principles that led them to their decisions. I highlighted key quotes that were important to their story and process.

By creating an Affinity Diagram I was able to see how there were similar themes and problems amongst all of the parents. I took these synthesized themes and created an Empathy Map which helped me establish their influences, pain points, tasks, feelings and goals they had throughout the school search process and how a new product could help them.

Empathy map

I learned that the process for finding a private school was very time consuming for the parents and there was no resource that explicitly stated all useful information about private schools which made the school search longer and more difficult for the parents.

See full Empathy Map here.

Defining the Problem

Synthesizing my research findings led me to understand the main problem. Parents looking for a private school for their children need a convenient way to find basic information, like location and values, on all private schools because it is difficult and time consuming to find the right one.

I began thinking of some How Might We Statements to help guide myself when I begin drawing out designs.

How might we make the search for private schools enjoyable?
How might we get all private schools information in one location?
How might we make finding a school faster?
How might we make communication less of a problem for the parents?
How might we create a map of all the private schools in the area?

Rapid Ideation

To continue my ideation process I looked at some indirect competitors like Airbnb and Zillow. Assuming these parents are familiar with these apps, I wanted to know what makes them so easy to use. With this, I wanted to include:

I learned through the user interview transcripts that some parents value the opinions of other parents. This led me to include a messaging feature which would allow the parents to directly message the school, or other parents, questions they may have throughout their process.

The messaging page

A school's profile page

'Favorites' page

Home page with check boxes

The second set of screens I drew is more reliant on a ‘Filter’ page. The filter would really help narrow their search and make it easier to find one that matches their needs. The user would also have the option to add a school to the 'Favorites' page which they could go back to whenever convenient.

'Favorites' page

A school's profile page

Home page with schools

Filter with flexible settings

Getting Feedback & Creating a Flow

I showed the two concepts to a peer of mine. I told them the problem I was solving for, and who the general audience would be. Some feedback that really stood out to me was:

An onboarding process with questions is necessary to show the user any type of ‘Suggested Schools’
Providing the contact information for each school could replace the messaging feature completely
The ‘Filter’ page from the second concept is more user friendly
The school’s page needs more details, but should not be over-crowded with information

After receiving this feedback I decided to use the second concept I created because it received a better response overall. I created a User Flow Diagram to highlight each step the user would take throughout the prototype, and to help myself create a design with a specific goal in mind.

The user flow represents a potential user’s journey to finding private schools using the filter and then adding a school to their ‘Favorites’ where they can save it for later.

Check out the full User Flow here.

Mid-Fidelity Prototype

The prototype includes an onboarding process that will provide ‘Suggested Schools’ to the user based on the answers they provide. Once the user is signed in they can filter their search to narrow down the schools. When they find a school they are interested in they can click the heart icon to add it to their ‘Favorites’.

Reflection

This project helped me understand how important user interviews are. Reading the user interview transcripts put me in the parents' shoes and made me understand their experiences and pain points. This made the rest of the UX process a lot easier for me.

If I had to continue with this project I would conduct more testing of the mid-fidelity prototype, specifically a navigation test, to see if there were any parts of the user flow that were confusing and where it can be improved or simplified.

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