DISCOVER

We began our research by creating a proto-persona. We wanted to have a clear picture of who we were trying to reach so we could appropriately build our process on how we could properly obtain data. We gathered our collective knowledge, information from the media, friends with kids grades K-12, and teachers to visualize Carolina who represented all the parents struggling to balance life with work, family, and covid.

We held interviews to understand users’ motivations and needs on a qualitative level moving education from a physical classroom to a virtual classroom. Our goal was to gather how were parents, students, and teachers were handling the change in daily routines, navigating resources, and handling tech issues.

As the interviews took place, it was surprising to learn that covid-related information wasn’t lacking nor were tech issues were of concern. We could see how passionate parents were about creating a nurturing environment for their children in how they responded. We could also hear the stress and frustration in their voices as they spoke about their experience juggling with the new role of at-home teacher.

We took the opportunity to go deeper with a survey that would provide quantitive data to support data we had already collected from the interviews.

DEFINE

Each response was analyzed and placed on a card that could be sorted in an affinity diagram which not only provided insights but allowed us to fully empathize with our users. We then created an empathy map and begin to get to the root of the problem.

The problem was that remote learning has diminished the supportive school environment previously provided to students causing immense stress for both parents and students.

Parents are stressed by the lack of time, teaching resources, and supportive community.

Students are constrained in their physical, social, and developmental needs.

How were we going to overcome such massive obstacles? Originally, we had reviewed the Los Angeles Unified School District website but we realized that wasn’t where there was a need, even though there were issues with the usability and the design left a lot to be desired. We reevaluated our research and decided we could make the most impact at the school level. We selected West Hollywood Elementary School to redesign. Parents and student were logging into virtual classrooms through the school website. They weren’t even visiting at district website in nearly all cases. We backtracked slightly and completed a new heuristic evaluation and annotation of the West Hollywood Elementary School website. Aesthetically it wasn’t appealing, there seemed to be so much content that it was cluttered, there were videos all over the page, and the call to action was difficult to perceive.

We were ready to ideate. The issue we wanted to address foremost was the lack of mentoring support. How could we best support parents with teaching and provide a tool for students? We decided on creating a new feature that was a virtual learning hub. Parents could use it to watch lessons recorded during virtual classes to better understand the content and in turn help their children by explaining the content in another way. This would alleviate parents from wasting time on youtube or google trying to find answers.

We created a user scenario to help determine the best plan of action and storyboarded our idea. We were ready to card sort and implement this new feature as part of the redesign.

DEVELOP

DELIVER

Next

Takeaways