Avela
Connecting Kids to the Right Schools
Overview
Avela’s mission is to allocate resources and match individuals to opportunities. With the focus on education where they want to empower school districts to offer choice to parents finding the right fit for their children. Our team of 4 UX Designers created features to further the user’s experience on the school finder service based on actual research.
Role
My role was the UX Designer/Researcher to make key decisions during the design process with research in mind from user interviews and worked with my team to exchange feedback with the Avela members.
Problem
Solution
Parents need a better way to find a school for their children that best fits their busy lifestyle
Design a mobile first school finder web application based on research data of Avela target users in the U.S.
Our approach
Research
To discover the pain points from a parents perspective we conducted user interviews and researched the competitor school finder’s.
User research
Understanding the potential Avela users.
Interviews
Synthesis
From our research, we discovered a few insights, including parents wanting reviews and concern for bullies within the school. From here, we analyzed the data and created personas.
15 interviewees (20-40 mins each 1 on 1 interview)
Parents who have selected a school before or for the first time between the ages of 25-45 from different socioeconomic backgrounds
We tried to find out…
How do users get reviews for schools?
How was their last enrollment experience like?
What criteria is important when selecting a school?
Synthesis
Design
Between teammates, we had a wide range of ideas having us brainstorm and ideate in multiple sessions. Combining all ideas, we then moved towards a prototype to polish in the testing phase.
Deliver
To centralize all of this information we gathered all research data in 1 document so the client can refer back to it.
After conducting the interviews and identifying the need patterns, we categorized some of the trends we discovered through affinity mapping. To further explore the emotions a parent might experience during the enrollment process, we created a journey map to display some of the emotions described during the 1:1 interviews.
We created the persona of Marcia, who represents a large portion of busy parents who don’t have enough time to do research on schools. She is familiar with the tedious process of applying for schools and the waiting lists. She needs to find extracurricular activities, academic ratings, and reviews so she can pick the right school.
What do Avela’s users want for the school finder experience?
Users find extra value in reading other parent’s reviews for a school
Users want to be able to compare schools
Users prefer an easy enrollment process for their child
Refining design
What users think about Avela’s experience?
We conducted a usability test with 12 users for 2 rounds remotely. We provided tasks for them to complete.
Tasks:
Check the ratings/reviews of a school
Apply to a school that has a STEM program
Compare 2 schools
Find a catholic school
What worked?
Intuitive navigation for the bottom 3 icons
Adding a preference button to the home screen to refine searches
A share button to increase engagement between users
What didn’t work?
Added review stars for better comparison
Changed hiearchy of filter styles
Changed compare button to an icon with label
Implemented a share button to allow for more engagement
Through our research, we helped the Avela team understand some of the pain points parents have during the school enrollment process. Initially, I personally expected there to be some resistance to the pivot we proposed to Abrey (Lead Engineer) but it surprised me to see our client being very receptive and open-minded. He understood the reasoning and research backing up the pivot and was all for it. Our team met with Abrey and Sophia (Product designer) outside of our normal sprint meetings a couple of times to have continual discussions about our project. Being able to build a good collaboration with Greg/Abrey/Sophia helped us to have open, clear communication throughout our entire project.
Outcomes and results
Try out the Avela school finder experience
Next steps
Create a responsive web application for desktop and tablet
Create a user account system
Allow users to enroll to a school within the application rather than third-party
Create a native app
Diversity and inclusion on the filters page and school card page