Introduction:-
Schools App is the best way for students at their college or university to connect and make friends prior to and during college.
Why I picked Education?
Since the COVID-19 pandemic has imprisoned us in our homes for an indefinite period. And the most affected group is students of Universities and Schools as this pandemic has put their future at stake.
Though people are managing via zoom calls or Skype etc, but they don’t provide students as well as teacher the proper class room experience.
Why Zoom calls doesn’t fulfill the student and teacher needs?
Though it provides one-on-one interactions. But it does more harm than good. There have been cases and news all around where students were caught doing mischievous things to piss off teachers.
Also, students do idiotic things like howling, calling out names that affect the decorum of the class, and disturbs other students who want to study.
There is no proper utility where students can see the recordings of videos if they missed any call or couldn’t understand in one go. Having recordings can help teachers to plan their future lectures.
There is no utility in zoom calls or Skype calls where teachers can send assignments to students and students can submit them.
Plus the teacher has to take attendance by calling out names and it can take up a lot of time based on the number of students present.
Students lack classroom like environment (which is a must for primary-section kids as they need more attention and discipline).
Challenge
Many students have difficulty using the school website via student portal. Problems include:
Find ability — Vital Information is lumped with other account information
Portability — not easily viewed on Smartphone, requires zooming and scrolling
Usability — difficulty in using the site because of too many animations and popups.
Convenience — there is no easy way to view and edit student’s data.
Solution
Most students know what they want to find at the school portal. Allowing students to login view and update biodata check results and also make payments incentivize students to get engaged more. A user-centered research process is needed in order to confirm this hypothesis.
Features of the app:
• Student Directory: Find other students based on name and common interests.
• Activity Feed: See what other students are talking about and get answers to your questions.
• Study Group Finder - Study alone? Study with the help of other students!
• Group Messaging - Start a group, find a group, and be part of the discussion.
• Roommate Finder: Find great people so you can live better!
• Private Messaging: Connect with staff and students in real time.
• Announcements: Don’t miss the important messages from the school.
Having problems and issues clear in the other apps, I had to look out for solutions.
I started researching similar apps that provide schooling experience and those that have live sessions embedded in them like Instagram.
Surprisingly, I couldn’t find any app that provides schooling experience to schools digitally. Though I found a UI kit but it was paid. So I decided to iterate over my ideas and to turn them into screens and iterate again.
So now the challenge was bigger I had no reference to look upon and have the time constraint.
User Research
I started this research by formulating a simple question via an online Google form. After developing a research plan, I set out to conduct my user research. I sent the link to friends and class group chats if they can fill out the survey, and if they can let their friends know as well.
The online survey includes 5 questions, and I was hoping to find insight into understanding the target demographics and multitasking habits. 20 users have completed the survey and have provided me with qualitative data needed to validate my assumptions.
Insights
I studied dozens of feedback I got. It was a fun and revealing process to see how students are interested in having a student portal as a mobile app, and also the features that would be necessary.
Interview Summary
Based on the survey and interview research, the results indicate that:
Users want many options of updating data
Users want to have time to use
Users want flexibility on making payments.
Personas and Empathy Map
User research has allowed me to be able to develop a better insight of the average user. Based on my findings, I was able to create hypothetical personas based on the information given from the survey and interviews. I also created a persona map to understand what a user’s perspective:
User Basic Flow
I created 3 scenarios for my personas to navigate based on their goals. The user flows shows how each step can allow for a user to reach the desired goal while using the app. The three user flows consist of:
Login
View Menu Options
Get to Desired View
Visual Design
In an attempt to attract as many users as possible, I took my time to learn and understand what it means to have a strong visual design, making sure that the visuals are as good as possible. I worked on a style guide, and onboarding illustrations.
CONCLUSION
Working on this project has been a great experience and I have learned about the user-centered design process in great detail. Understanding the UX process through a user-centered lens has given us a great amount of information needed to design apps with the user in mind by understanding the motivations and desires of each user.
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