SchoolMinds: An end-to-end mobile application


Role
UX Designer
Researcher
Branding
Project Duration
4 weeks
(20 hrs/wk)
Per DesignLab Timeline
tools
Figma
Lucide.dev
Coolors

Overview


Background

Teaching encompasses a lot of processes that often must occur both simultaneously and in short periods of time: developing challenging and engaging material, building relationships with colleagues and students, and constantly refining their instructional practice. As a former teacher, I am interested in the ways that teachers use different tools to help carry out these processes.


The Problem

Developing new curricular materials from scratch can take a lot of time. Educators often expedite this process by searching for and adapting the materials of other educators. The particular problem that SchoolMinds seeks to solve is how to allow teachers to access materials created by other educators, manage these materials and be able to to understand how these material can be adapted to their instructional needs.

The Solution

Through a survey, competitive analysis, a prioritization exercise and user interviews, I was able to develop an end to end that enabled teachers to share curricular materials with other educators, find materials created by other educators and manage these all from the palm of their hand.

As I learned more about the solutions that teachers were already engaging with, I was able marry features from different products into a single product that met teachers exactly where they are at.

View Final Prototype

* * * * *

Research



Surveys

Initially, I set out to discover a particular area of teaching that teachers were engaging with tools in order to meet their needs. In order to do this, I developed a survey tool that asks teachers to indicate which areas of teaching were most significant to them and how they were utilizing different tools to help them meet the challenges they were facing in these areas. I found the most responses in the following for areas related to curriculum and instruction:

  1. Differentiating curriculum
  2. Finding culturally relevant materials
  3. Accommodating instruction for students with different needs
  4. Finding/adapting the materials of other educators
" Accessibility and resources. I feel like it’s difficult and time consuming to find student facing materials that are already prepared. "
" I’d say mostly finding and deciding on sources that are age-appropriate, cohesive, and informative while addressing the skills I want to teach."


User Interviews

In order to also understand the specific experiences that teachers were having with respect to these four problem areas, I also conducted user interviews with 5 current educators representing a diversity of contexts:

  • high school and elementary school
  • private, charter and public school
  • humanities and stem
  • 1.5-7.5 years of classroom experience

The interviews were mainly concerned with the challenges these educators were experiencing and how they were using different tools to meet these challenges.


Prioritization Exercise

In order to narrow down a particular problem area, I had 5 teachers do a prioritization exercise. I created four fictional products that addressed the four problem areas that the survey had indicated were significant to teachers. I asked the teachers to indicate how they would allocate a finite amount of money to products that addressed each of these problems and then explain the reasoning behind their allocations.

Of the 4 potential products that users could allocate funds to, the highest (overall and average) allocations were giving to the product allowing users to share curricular tools and content with each other. The second highest allocations were given to the product that helped users find culturally relevant sources.


" Accessibility and resources. I feel like it’s difficult and time consuming to find student facing materials that are already prepared. "
" This would be worth an investment if I knew there was a wide array of teachers to learn from who are going to post often."



Competitive Analysis

I found that educators were using many products that weren’t explicitly created for teachers as teaching tools. For my competitive analysis, I set out to evaluate how these tools were meeting the needs of teachers and supporting them with the processes involved in teaching. I examined four competitors that emerged from survey and interview data: Facebook groups, Teachers Pay Teachers, Google Drive, and Twitter.




I found 3 genres of products that were being used by educators. Each genre gave an insight into the needs of educators with respect to a tool that supported their work around curriculum.

View Competitive Analysis

Summary of Discovery Stage

During the Discover stage, I set out to understand the challenges faced by the users I was designing for educators.

  • I learned from survey responses that teachers as users were interested in the areas of differentiating curriculum, finding culturally relevant materials, accommodating instruction for students with different needs, and finding/adapting the materials of other educators.
  • I learned from user interviews about the specific challenges 5 teachers were having in these problem areas and what tools they were using
  • I learned from conducting a prioritization exercise that teachers were most in a product that would allow them to share materials with other educators
  • I learned about the different ways that educators were using unconventional products (or products who they were necessarily the explicit audience for) by analyzing Facebook, Twitter, Teachers Pay Teachers and Google Drive as teaching tools

* * * * *

Define


Affinity Map

Following the user interviews, I created an affinity map with the data and found 3 key themes:

I think it’s well-known that teachers often have limited resources to do their work and a major issue with developing curriculum is making it engaging to students. I did find it intriguing how much good lesson planning involved being metacognitive when developing materials in terms of thinking about the thinking of students, thinking about their own thinking or trying to understand the thinking of other adults.

" Ideally lesson planning would be the curation of materials that make learning visible. "
View Affinity Map

Problem Statement

The problem of how might we enable teachers to access the curricular materials of other teachers and understand how these can be adapted for their needs captures the goal of bringing educational resources of other educators to teachers and demystifying how these materials can be readily implemented.

Personas

There only seemed to be two personas when considering a product that would allow teachers to share materials with one another. The main behavioral difference being their willingness to share materials versus need to look for materials, and this could be related to their level of teaching experience.








Summary of Design Stage

During the Define stage, I clarified the specific problem I wanted to design a solution around:

  • The affinity map underscored the limited resources of teachers and the need to make lessons meaningful. But I also learned about the explicit role metacognition plays in lesson planning.
  • I selected a HMW questions that focused on the problem allowing teachers to share materials with each other that could be clearly be adapted for their specific needs
  • I also examined 2 personas that diverged in their willingness/confidence to share materials with other teachers due to their level of teaching experience (and thus willingness/confidence/capacity to share materials)


* * * * *

Design


Storyboard

In order to contextualize the product’s purpose and the corresponding features that would meet the needs of the personas I had developed, I crafted a storyboard.





Feature Roadmap

I then brainstormed potential features using creative constraints and analogous inspiration from competitors I had examined and competitors that weren’t mentioned, but have features that would make sense for the product I was building. I decided on the following 3 functions as the must have features:

Upon deeming these 3 features as the basis of the minimum viable product, I deprioritized features that would allow users to connect with other users on the app, create/curate a profile, create annotations to uploaded materials and create communities where they can centrally share materials with a set group of people.

View Feature Roadmap

Site Map

The site map for the product incorporated navigation for the 3 mvp features but I also incorporated navigation to sections for future features that would allow users to connect with others and make notes.

User Flows and Task Flows

I focused the primary user flow and subsequent task flows around a user uploading new material, searching for new material and saved new material.


View User Flows and Task Flows

Home Page Design

Initially, I conceptualized the home page to be a dashboard. I thought that it would make sense for users to take multiple actions on this page and have shortcuts to other parts of the app. After raising it in GroupCrits and taking inspiration from Pinterest, I decided to make the home page the search/explore page. This made more sense as the first page that users land on when they enter the app. This allowed me to use the nav bar to hold the primary actions that users would be taking on the app instead of having the dashboard serve this function.



As I increased fidelity, one major consideration I needed to make was how to construct the cards that would hold the material. I had to consider what image would be displayed and how much space the text needed. Initially, I was taking inspiration from Pinterest in terms of card construction. In the final iteration, there is 1 card per row leaving ample space for the material title text. I also made the decision for users to select styles for image so that the images would be formatted consistently.



Saved Material Page Design

For the saved material page, I had similar considerations around the organization of the cards on the screens and the tabs that would help users filter through the content. I also initially design these cards each with drop down menus, but did away with these since the cards were clickable and there was very little space for these menus.




Branding

For the brand of this app, I explored a lot of ideas for brand names. I was tempted to go with something simple like TeacherMade, but found many of these options already being utilized for existing products. SchoolMinds was one of the few ideas that got positive feedback during a GroupCrit as it captured the collaborative nature of the brand. I also experimented with two color palettes after research other educational apps/platforms used by teachers. I found that the combination of orange, purple, yellow and green/blue received positive feedback in terms of capturing the joyful, engaged and curious aspects of the brand. Finally, I played around a lot with different ideas for the logo. The most unique idea was three stick figures whose hands were touching each other. I found that they also created the outline of a book. After initially being concerned that this logo wouldn’t scale, I was able to thicken the line so that it would be able scale. I then added the brand colors and found that it captured the brand values and complimented the brand name very nicely.

View Branding

Component Design

For the button design, I made sure there was enough padding around the text. It was important to make sure the text size was large enough for readability and that the text was medium. I chose the purple for the button to contrast from the yellow in the plus button. I also opted for a very curved corners.

View UI Library

Usability Testing

I drafted a usability test plan and found subjects for testing based on availability. 3/5 of the testers were the same folks who I had conducted user interviews with. The pool of testers ended up being a little less diverse, representing humanities and high school educators.




Feedback Prioritization

Testing found no errors with the website in terms of flow all users were successfully upload files, search for and save material and open saved material. Users did however have a lot of rich feedback about how to iterate and improve on the website's design.



I sorted the feedback into the following categories: (1) overall design/flow/ui, (2) wonderings.  I then prioritized the feedback according to effort and value.  The following will be prioritized as big wins requiring little effort but high value:



View Afinity Map

Priority Revisions

I focused my iterations on the saved screen, the search screen, the different drawers containing actions for users to take.

I added a card for folders and added create a folder to the drawer that comes up when users click the plus button. I also brought back the three dot menu so that users could take actions on cards. On this drawer, I created options for users to download the material to specific destinations.



I took out editable PDFs as an option and added Word docs and Powerpoints as formats that users could upload.


I also revised the flow on the prototype to allow for users to both search for new materials by click on the search bar and by using the menu options and filters on the search page as well accommodating users who wanted narrowed content before searching.

Summary of the Design Stage

During the Design stage, I designed and tested an app based on allowing teachers to access and manage materials created by other teachers.

  • The storyboard I created helped me contextualize the product’s purpose and the corresponding features that would meet the needs of the personas I had developed
  • The feature roadmap helped me determine that the MVP of the app consistent of allowing users to share and access content and that other features could be deprioritized
  • The site map helped me translate the must have features into a coherent and intuitive information hierarchy
  • I designed a home screen that I eventually made the search page to help establish purpose when users first open the app
  • I designed a saved material screen that users could use to help them manage the content they found during search
  • I designed a nav bar that used familiar and accessible language and iconography to further convey to users the purpose of the app and how it could meet their needs
  • I created a brand capturing the joyful, engaged, curious and collaborative nature of the SchoolMinds app through color choices and an original logo design
  • I created components following best practices that also fit the brand
  • I designed and tested prototype to get feedback on users’ experience using the app to upload material, find new material and manage material
  • I prioritized feedback that improved the experience of the search page and the saved material page and clarified the format of materials and ability to export materials upon saving them


* * * * *

Deliver


Final Design

My design for the final prototype, included below, incorporated revised search and saved material screens and a revised flow from the home screen.





Next Steps

The next steps in this project would involve addressing some of the big bets that users brought up such as adding the ability for users to leave reviews about material they have used, thinking about how to populate the app with materials prior to its launch, exploring different viewports for users who want to work from desktop or iPad, integrating this app with other platforms teachers share material on and do more testing on testing in STEM to see if this app meets their needs. As a next step, I would also build out the screens for the notes and teams features that I deprioritized in the feature roadmap.


Summary of Delivery Stage

During the Deliver stage, I wrapped up the design process with the following elements:

  • A final prototype with redesigned search and saved material screens, and a revised flow for the search screen.
  • Considerations of next steps including big bets to consider as well as features that were deprioritized in the feature roadmap

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Conclusion


In this project I was able to select an audience and discover a problem organically through research in this project. I was able to use the research that zoomed in on solutions that users were using that weren’t necessarily built for them, understand the ways these solutions were being used and actually design something for this audience based on the tools they had been using. It was really refreshing to hear the ways that this app could be implemented right away during testing and it definitely shapes my identity as a UX designer. I really want to be able to make apps like this that impact people’s lives in positive ways.