Hureo

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Parent- School App, is an application developed for parents who are involved in their child’s education.
This app can be used by the parents to keep a track on their children’s education by the data provided on the app by the school.
The idea behind the app was that the school would update the student’s information such as academic progress report, his grades, his participation in extra curricular activities, his classwork and homework in the app; so as to make it instantly available for parents.
The app also included curriculum videos of the subjects he is taking, to help the child better understand the topic he is learning.

Why the project started?

Hureo was a UX Research consultancy firm.
Hired to do evaluative research on an existing prototype ready to be launched in less than a month.

CONSTRAINTS

1. Fill in the gaps with appropriate research methods which should have been done pre-design.
2. We were given 2 weeks to provide the entire research.

PROBLEM STATEMENTS

1. To evaluate the perception of a parent, having a child between grade one to seven, and analyzing their usage of the app, ‘Parent-School App’.
2. To examine if the app is a good fit in the current market and how it compares to other existing school applications.

GOALS

Identify parents’ needs and challenges according to their child’s requirements.
Suggesting designs based on these needs and challenges.
Research on the use of any existing educational apps.
Understanding a preferred price point for such apps.
Conduct a usability testing to understand the design friendliness of the app.

RESEARCH METHODS USED

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH	QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Frequency Calculations	Contextual Surveys
A/B Testing	User Interviews (Remote and In-person)
Cardsorting Exercise	Usability Tests
Value	User Persona
	Jouney Maps

PRELIMINARY RESEARCH

Steps:-

Recruiting the right candidates.
Empathy Interviews.
User Persona Creation
Journey Maps.
High-Level Findings Report.

Recruiting right candidates:

In such a small given timeline, we could not afford having an improper recruitment of users who instead being the target users turn out to be outliers and thus, judging the entire feasibility of the project based on people who may or may not be using the app afterall. Thus, we did a through recruitment even on our end instead of just sticking to company given users.

Differentiating Criteria	Company Given Users	Newly Found Users
Background/ Knowledge of app	The company had launched similar apps in their child's school before; thus they were familiar with the company and their work.	Had no idea about such applications. Some had never even heard of the concept.
Building contact	Search from the given list of parents, by the company and pick out the ones that fit the existing demographics	With the help of google search and few keywords, we compiled a document of parents who fit the demographics and tried contacting each one by offering incentive for being part of the research interviews.
Challenges in recruitment	None, as the list was preexisting. We only had to pick out the suitable candidates that fit the demographics.	Getting unknown people to trust and believe us in participating in field tests.
Language/ Lifestyle	Most families from the given list were well educated and spoke in english for the interview.	Difficulty understanding few users who were not fluent in English and only spoke their local language.

Example questions asked for recruiting participants:

Q) How techno savvy are you?

What apps do you use on your phone?
Do you use any shopping apps or bank transaction apps? Are you on social media?

Q) How many children do you have? What is their age?
(To check if they fit in the age group of defined participants)

Empathy Interviews:

Created a questionnaire to further understand the user, their professional life, everyday life, challenges faced, how much time they could/were willing to spend for their children, amongst other things.

Using the questionnaire we not only researched on the users’ answers but we also analyzed his behavior, reactions and his triggers.
The questionnaire centered around the grounds of knowing the users thoroughly. The domains were:

a. User’s occupation f. Ways to motivate their children for doing school work
b. Technology usage g. Technology usage of their children
c. Child’s details h. Any time restrictions to use such devices.
d. School details i. What challenges do parents face while managing
e. Existing School App? j. Their child’s school activities?

This information was later used to form userpersonas and journey maps to further understand the usage of the app in its raw form, in day to day life.

User Types

While conducting interviews of parents we soon realized that even though the app is designed for understanding students' school performance its main target users were parents along with restricted access to their children.
Thus, the primary users for the study would be parents. Thus, the key targets for our usability studies were parents and secondary users were the children.

Cardsorting exercise conducted during user persona interviews to understand parent's priority in terms their child's work.

User Persona

After the initial analysis of the data we created user personas to best describe the users that were likely to use the product.

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Journey Maps

With the help of the initial empathy interviews we created Journey Maps, which helped better understand the daily schedules of parents. Through this data we could deduce how much time of the day they spend for themselves, their children, and on other activities.
It also reflected how this app could help manage their time more efficiently in regards to their child’s school related work.